Enron's Enablers

Truthdig by Robert Scheer
Enron's Enablers

[posted online on February 1, 2006]

Finally, after four years of legal maneuvering, the trial of Enron top dogs Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling opens a new window on the outrageous practices of our modern-day robber barons. But it is depressing that the politicians who benefited from Lay's largesse, and who changed the law enabling Enron's chicanery, are going unpunished and even uncriticized.

Indeed, the larger crime, in any proper moral dimension of that word, was committed in the rewriting of the law on corporate regulation to permit Enron's very existence as a humongous stock market swindler. There simply would be no Enron story were it not for the deregulation of the energy market ushered in by Republican politicians, as Lay himself acknowledged freely in a 2000 interview when asked to explain the "common thread" in Enron's business model.

"I think the common elements first are that, basically, we are entering markets or in markets that are deregulating or have recently deregulated, and so they have become competitive, moving from monopoly franchise-type businesses to competitive, market-oriented businesses," said Lay.