Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [66]
That’s right—they were proud of doing nothing while millions of Americans were swindled. And the fleecing was made possible to a large degree by the Bush administration’s willingness to let Enron run amok.
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It Slices, It Dices
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When he finally had to go before the press, George W. Bush tried to distance himself from his old friend and said, essentially, “Ken who?” Bush explained that his good buddy wasn’t really a good buddy, but was instead just some businessman from Texas. “He [Kenny Boy] was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run [for governor] in 1994!” Bush told the media. (In fact, Lay contributed almost four times as much money to Bush’s campaign for governor.)
When Enron officially went bankrupt in December 2001, Wall Street pundits and investors throughout the country were stunned.
But “bankrupt” has a different meaning for Enron’s top executives than it does for the rest of us. The company’s bankruptcy filing in 2001 shows 144 top executives received a total of $310 million in compensation and another $435 million in stock. That’s an average of over $2 million each in compensation and another $3 million in stock.
And while the big guns counted their millions, thousands of Enron workers lost their jobs and much of their savings. Enron had established three savings plans for its employees and at the time of the bankruptcy, 20,000 of them were members of these plans. Sixty percent of the plans were made up of Enron stock. When the stock evaporated to pennies from an August 2000 high of $90, these employees were left with next to nothing. Losses in 401(k) plans totaled more than $1 billion.
But huge losses from the Enron collapse extended far beyond its employees, to thousands of others who owned Enron stock in public retirement funds, which, according to a New York Times article, lost at least $1.5 billion.
And the Enron collapse sent the entire stock market into a downturn, with a negative ripple effect that is still being felt today.
But as I write this, in the summer of 2003, fewer than two dozen people have been charged with Enron-related crimes. Five of those have entered into plea agreements and are awaiting sentencing, and fifteen others are awaiting trial.
No charges have been filed against former Chairman Ken Lay or CEO Jeff Skilling.
So, what do we do?
The only true value your life has to the wealthy is that they need your vote every election day in order to get the politicians they’ve funded into office. They can’t do that by themselves. This damnable system of ours that allows for the country to be run by the will of the people is a rotten deal for them as they represent only 1 percent of “the people.” You can’t get tax cuts for the rich passed when the rich don’t have enough votes to pull it off. This is why they truly hate democracy: because it puts them at the distinct disadvantage of being in the smallest of the smallest minorities. So they need to somehow dupe or buy off 50 percent of the people to get the majority they need to run the show. That is no simple task. The easy part is buying the politicians,