Socialist Viewpoint

According to Time magazine (Jan. 28), “If the corporate directors and auditors and stock analysts who were supposed to be looking out for the interests of shareholders at Enron could be bought off with consulting and underwriting fees, we know they are probably being bought off elsewhere too.” Really?

Of course, that’s as far as Time is willing to go in saying our “best of all systems” has some problems. The real message they seem to be sending out, however, is in the title—“You’re On Your Own, The Enron lesson.”

“For several months after Sept. 11,” the author notes, “Americans have felt ourselves pulling together. But the Enron scandal has shown us or perhaps reminded us that when money is involved, we are truly on our own.”

For the capitalist class, who live high on the hog, but do no work, there is no way that they are on their own where money is concerned. They have the most powerful entity in human history—the United States government—backing them up, and standing ready, willing and able to bail them out when things go bad.

First, the capitalists have their own political parties, two of them. They pay the “elected” members of the Congress to regulate and de-regulate energy distribution and all other products of our highly industrialized society as suits capitalist America’s needs at any given time. They could not, of course, do that on their own. They had lots of help, 71 senators and 188 congresspersons, a majority of both houses of Congress.

They developed a long-term relationship with their “elected” and appointed government officials. They groomed the slickest among them to become national leaders. That’s their form of insurance. No matter who wins the election, Enron wins. But they didn’t do it on their own.

Enron routinely placed their corporate staffers at every important agency of the government, including the cabinet. Their nominees had to be approved by Senate committees. All but a handful of members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee got money from Enron or its fixer, Arthur Anderson Accounting. And the rest of corporate America’s paid agents sitting in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government made sure that the laws that Enron’s agents made were in harmony with their own interests.

The corporate share of the tax burden has declined drastically since the 1940s, through tax laws written by the same legislators whose campaigns are funded by the corporations. They riddle all the laws that are supposed to protect the public from corporate profiteers with loopholes that allow the corporations to pay little, or no, taxes.

And just to make sure that workers continue to pay an ever-increasing proportion of taxes, the employers withhold a big percentage of our earnings from our paychecks. In other words, those of us least able to pay, have taxes subtracted by employers every payday. The bosses, if they pay at all, get to wait until April 15th of the following year.

Of course, while the opinion-makers, like Time, insist that we common folk act “on our own” to protect our retirement money (which most of us don’t have much of, if any), they’re working overtime to protect the system that is set up to keep corporate entities like Enron laughing all the way to the bank.

You want “regulation?” Enron had “regulation” The “regulators” were helping them set up the swindle. The only kind of “regulation” that the corporate rich can understand is where the workers “regulate” them out of existence. After all, who needs Enron?

We all need energy. What we don’t need is private profit in the energy production and distribution systems. What we do need is the planned development and distribution of energy. We need energy that doesn’t destroy the environment. The planning should be done by the experts—that is, the workers who run the day-to-day operations of the energy industries. Profit-making is a drain on energy resources, a waste of money.

Some of our smart ancestors said, “Private property is theft.” Well, here’s Enron to prove them right. And the whole system of government, “regulatory agencies,” elections—in other words, the capitalist system in the place where it works best—made sure that Enron’s theft, with lots of help and collaboration from the government, would work very well indeed.

But if you think it’s only the laws governing the division of the wealth of the nation that are outrageously unfair, you would be wrong. All laws governing human social, economic and political affairs in capitalist society are rigorously enforced only on those without any way of buying either a good lawyer or a good friend in high office. And here’s Enron to prove it. Meanwhile, we’re “on our own” only so long as we believe that to be true. And when we stop believing that oft-told lie, then, we can actually, collectively, do something about it.