The politics of power

Seattle journalist David Neiwert meditates on the meaning of the recently released audio tapes of Enron energy traders laughing about F'ing California in the A during the state's multiple blackouts a while back:

I'm sure everyone's been following the brouhaha over the Enron Tapes and what they reveal about the tactics of the now-mostly-defunct-but-still-thrashing-about energy giant. And make no mistake, what the tapes confirm is what was perhaps already clear: a corporate culture so reptilian, so deeply devoid of ethics and so far outside the law, that it now has its own special wing reserved in the depths of Business Hell.

What's especially worth observing about the tapes, though, is what they say about the bigger picture. Thomas Leavitt at Seeing the Forest explains:

"The Enron Tapes and the Snohomish vs. Enron hearing aren't just about a few potty mouthed "bad apples" at Enron engaging in opportunistic exploitation of regulatory loopholes (as Enron's PR people would like you to believe). They highlight a fundamental problem of our system of governance: the balance of power between corporations and the average human citizen is way out of whack. This is a point that those of us on our side of the issue would be well served to bring to the fore.

Enron lobbied our legislators and regulatory agencies with the conscious and deliberate intent of creating a non-transparent marketplace full of inefficiencies that they could then exploit (see Dr. Carl Pechman's testimony, quoted in previous posts). AND OUR LEGISLATORS AND REGULATORS LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT... or rather, they did not intervene, because they saw nothing unusual in the process as it happened."

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