Enron hasnt Paid any income tax in 4 of the last five years

it wasn't illegal, they are allowed to write off the options exercised by executives at their company. in fact they actually got a refund of some 278 million, this is why the whole idea of campaign finance reform is so misdirected all of the power of the federal government is in the tax code simplifying it would end most of the corruption. the whole enron case is a bit too complex for the media, arbitraging is terribly convoluted and difficult to manage and to run a story on how enron booked future profits as current profits and how they were playing both sides of a trade trying to hedge their bets when because they were so large their actions pretty well determined the arbitraging market would put most people to sleep but to say 'oh they gave money to politicians and then did dastardly acts because of undue influence' seems perfectly obvious. they received something like 4 billion in government secured contracts and loans from the clinton administration, little from bush but it seems critics want it both ways and declare bush should have stepped in to protect the shareholders when in fact had they govt stepped in it would have only accelerated the panic in the stock. kenneth lay is an a-hole and he and all of his cronies who cashed out before the sh*t hit the fan should be on tab for the billions of dollars lost because of them. the bit about the conspiracy with cheney is funny, enron was the largest supplier of energy in the country so to think they should not have a say in energy policy is absurd but that's conspiracy nuts for you.

that's cos they're broke - have some compassion for gods sake.

this is the type of ruling system America is governed by. What shall we call it ..." Corporacracy"? big business is the destruction of basic human living if you ask me. Politicians and executives are the lovers...cash from one, deals in return!

The media overkill is telling. The story has quickly become a Woodward-ish Watergate story of culprits whose punishment will cleanse a system that's generally benign. Nobody wants to cover the real story: what forces and institutions have fostered a climate in which Enron's behavior is not only accepted but encouraged? I wonder why. Is Chomsky right, that it's simply the big news corps' conflicts of interest that blinker them from uncivic actions that our US megalopolies perpetrate?

Well, considering that Enron was a pretty damn big company, and Dubya and Crew have such extensive ties to Enron (several cabinet members worked at some time or other for Enron before it went belly-up), it's inevitable that there'd be a lot of press about this. Although, as so much else, that press coverage is "a day late and a dollar short" (which is prob. just restating what Tracer said more elegantly). The media may not also be covering how and why Enron got so big because of the Dubya angle.

Enron were a corrupt and corrupting bunch of fuckers. they made there money by breaking open energy markets for the benefit of themselves and noone else (cf. californian energy crisis, UK energy market deregulation). they used accounting methods which at best can be called exceedingly creative to inflate their percieved profits while paying bugger all tax on them. Their auditors colluded with them in this . While nothung may have been strictly illegal, although Andersen are in a very shaky position for their audits, what they have done from how they raised their money to how they paid their taxes to how they bought influence and laws is deeply immoral.

This is why purecapitalism is deeply evil, people will only actin their own interest, not even in the intrest of the shareholders in the company. The directors and senior management should be strung up for the massive insider trade they made before Enron went down the drain.

Also Enron was a company which appeared to do nothing, they produced nothing, they moved nothing from place to place, they built nothing (not entirely true they did build a few power station but this activity was minimal in comparison to the rest). All they did was buy up energy and sell it on. Notice how the (still slightly regulated) UK energy market coped with the colapse of Enron with not so much as a blip in supply.

I did a bunch of technical work last year on newpower.com, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Enron. It owned no electric plants or distribution networks. It was an electricity reseller in specific markets where that was legal. They were always getting us to revise the site - purposelessly it seemed, half the time. But they were a cash cow and no one asked questions. I wonder now if a lot of that work was asked for in order to make it seem like they were actually spending money somewhere.

Several months later I worked on the design standards for Arthur Anderson. SNAP.