These acts of corporate rapaciousness make it clear how easily ordinary citizens can be hurt when executives try to make money 'creatively' by moving money rather than producing a product or fulfilling a real service. Enron is often mistakenly called an energy company, but it was really more of a speculative entity. This is another illuminating aspect of the documentary for those viewers who may only know about the Enron debacle through the popular media. The company existed only to show profits on its balance sheet, and to do so it tried 'every trick in the book' to keep its stock price high.
One of the most shocking revelations is how the Enron Company single-handedly created the California energy crisis: in case anyone is wondering why nothing has been said about the crisis since Enron folded, is because there never was a real crisis. The documentary has conclusive proof that Enron encouraged California power plants managers to shut down the plants, to drive up the price of electricity, indifferent to the personal suffering and profit losses for untold numbers of people that this caused. The current market melt-down is testimony to how easily fortunes can be won and lost on paper, but the Enron example is even worse because the company actually engaged in criminal activity, like a kind of white collar terrorist shutting down power.
It is hard not to feel sympathetic when the movie reports how the orchestrators of the fraud, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling,...
Once again, cavalier behavior by executives is motivated by greed and arrogance that they can 'beat the system.' But a viewer of today might wish to exclaim -- why has this happened yet again, this time in the real estate and the credit markets? Why is there not greater surveillance and regulation of corporate activities?
Perhaps one of the answers is the fact that human nature has not changed. Not only are human beings greedy, but they also have a tendency to do what they are told, if everyone else seems to be 'going along with the flow.' At the highly competitive workplace of Enron, because unethical and illegal behavior was encouraged and praised, employees complied. The need for whistleblowers and a vigilant media to stand up for what is right is also important to ensure that greed does not run rampant. Newspapers and documentaries like "The Smartest Guys in the Room" enforce checks upon the financial system and are just as vital to our nation's future financial health as is more government regulation of speculation in the financial markets. The challenge is to make the public understand and care about what is being wrought, a challenge that this film meets successfully. It is a work of bitterly humorous entertainment as much as it is informative.
Works Cited
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room." Directed by Alex Gibney. 2005.
