The Smartest Guys (and they do mean Guys) in the Room
The HDnet Films documentary has been out on DVD for some time. It’s about an hour 50 minutes of narrative plus sound and video clips; a lot of the video is stock footage illustrating the sound track rather than actual footage of the principals or events, but it holds together OK (it wavers between an audio documentary and slide show with a lot of video filler, and a video documentary). It’s divided like a feature article into sections or chapters with titles, a nice organisational touch; there’s good continuity from one chapter to another, with titles often referring back to an actual quote from a principal character in the preceding segment. (The chapters may correspond to those in the book of the same name; I haven’t read it so I wouldn’t know.) A pop music score accompanies each chapter, usually with humorous intent.
The narrative starts with the suicide of an Enron executive — the film-maker’s entry point into the story. Then comes a sketchy biography of Ken Lay, and so on into a fairly coherent chronology that weaves together the deregulation of energy markets, the stock market bubble of the late 90′s, the California “energy crisis” (artificial scarcity created by Enron traders to jack up prices), the California recall election and Ahnold’s installation as Governator, the Bush II election, and so on until the unravelling of the Enron scam and the arrests of Skilling, Lay, et al. Various interviewees include investment analysts (one of whom was fired for daring to suggest that Enron was unsound), lawyers, ex-employees of the company; the principals speak to us mostly from archival footage from the Enron investigations, and (bizarrely) from internal company videos — promotional videos, documents of shareholder meetings, and strange little internal PR video efforts intended at the time to be humorous.
It’s late and I didn’t take notes while watching, so this is just a quick review of a few things that jumped out at me. One is the obvious connection (which the film makers clearly emphasised) between the neocon/neolib/Chicago-school “market ideology” and the Enron fiasco. Much is made of the fanatical belief of the chief company officers in an Ayn Randian perversion of Darwinian theory. This “faith in markets” is ridiculed by several of the interviewees, particularly with regard to the deregulation of power supply in California which cost the state some $30B. The crypto-Darwinism did not stop with market theory; Skilling, one of the prime criminals in the case, turned the company’s internal personnel procedures into a kind of Survivor show by means of a review process which required 15 percent of the personnel to be rated as failures and fired, annually. The review process involved a component of voting by peers and colleagues, so that employees at Enron could be literally voted out of the company by their colleagues as part of the annual review process. One ex-employee after another alludes to the brutal, divisive atmosphere of cut-throat competition.
Another theme which the film-makers glossed over, touching on it as an eccentricity or colourful curiosity rather than as a major clue to the pathological behaviours of the Enron management caste, was the strongly gendered (masculinist) posturing of the upper echelon management. Skilling, for example, led “adventure trips” for friends and employees which consisted of a bunch of rich guys doing stupid and dangerous things to prove their masculinity to themselves and each other; injuries were common on these trips which were similar to hazings or ordeals (a frat club atmosphere). One of his managerial hitmen was obsessed with strippers and spent nearly every evening after work in a nearby strip club; company mythology says that he hired the strippers to come to his executive office for a private show. The language of the day traders as they discuss their extortion scheme for California is highly gendered and misogynist, and the tone of the gloating and bragging is unmistakably locker-room stuff. But the film-maker does not connect these dots.
The film-maker stays within the bounds of acceptable liberal discourse: at only one moment does a critique of capitalism ever raise its head — and that very timidly, by way of the music soundtrack rather than the narration or any interviewee. There is criticism of “corporate culture” and of those who “care about nothing but money,” and there is fairly strong criticism of freemarket absolutism; but there is of course no structural or analytical critique of capitalism — it is taken for granted like the masculinism that so clearly informs the sociopathy of many of these characters. However it’s made quite clear that the Enron scam could never have been perpetrated without the collusion of a double handful of allegedly reputable institutions — international investment banks, Andersen Accounting, and so on. Exposure and critique of Lay’s and Enron’s cosy relationship with the Bush family is fairly open and frank, but any connection with the secret Cheney Energy Task Force, the failed Afghan pipeline deal, or the Iraq invasion plan is never mentioned or suggested.
Reference is made to situational ethics and the Milgram Experiment, but not to the Stanford Prison Experiment which I would have thought also quite relevant. Gray Davis makes an unexpectedly sympathetic appearance — by comparison with the Messrs. Ripley of Enron in the starring roles, he seems almost human.
The documentary does a good job of positioning the Enron collapse in the context of other events — or rather, positioning other events in the context of the Enron collapse. It does not finish connecting the dots and put pirate capitalism in the context of diminishing returns on Enclosure and on resource extraction (liquidation); the finance capital shenanigans of the “smartest guys in the room” are presented as a “Greek tragedy” (the actual words of one interviewee) of overweening cleverness, hubris and greed (all true so far as it goes)… and as a failure of Republican deregulation-mania (a partisan touch there), rather than as — also –the inevitable flailing of overconcentrated capital seeking avenues for growth in the face of hard physical limits. However, though it falls short of radical analysis itself, it’s a treasure trove of quotes, video clips, and capsule histories that radical analysis can sift through and make use of. I give it about 3.5 stars out of five (or whatever metric we’re using this week on ‘Gramsci and Cabral Go to the Movies’)…
DeAnander:
Thought I would get the Friday Film Review up early this week, as my Friday promises to be busy.
31 August 2006, 5:56 pmJames M:
One of the things I appreciated greatly was the female writer (for Fortune, was it?) whose critical thinking and ability to see through all the macho, overhyped, triumphalist bullshit lit the fuse that eventually brought all these “smartest guys” down.
Capitalist stooge though she may be
, I found it deliciously ironic that it only took one woman to deflate and collapse this megalithic male enterprise … just one person pointing out the emperors’ nudity started a chain reaction that caused the whole empire to fall.
31 August 2006, 6:11 pmDeAnander:
yes she was an appealing character — despite her obvious state of Clueless Privilege, blah blah. her evident intelligence and lack of affectation were kinda refreshing, especially in contrast to the bizarre posturing and psychopathic lying of the Enron execs. there is also the (female!) Enron employee who blew the whistle *inside* the company — another appealing character with common sense and real intelligence (vs the febrile capacity for glib fantasy that passed for it in the mad male fabricators at the top). I seem to remember reading somewhere that more than half of whistleblowers are female, even though they come mostly from professions and echelons where less than half the workforce is female.
31 August 2006, 6:47 pmShane:
Hi
I saw this some time ago and enjoyed it in many respects – tho I am writing from Australia and in that context was able to get a better sense of the scale of it and what happened than I had before.
Politically tho I thought the picture that it painted was still one of corporate “excess” and the way these “guys” were able to pull this off – I thought there was a sort of grudging admination for their ability – just a pity it was used in such a bad way.
So the critique was still a liberal one and in that sense missed drawing out the implications instead focusing on the chief executives – one of whol is still living in the lap of luxury in Hawaii. It seems extraordinary to me (despite being pretty cynical about these things) that Enron could have gone to its Accounting firm (its own internal finance section sure) with a plan to value assets at their FUTURE value and not be told “Arrrm thats bad accountancy” and the banks colluding in what was obviously a scam to buy stock using Enron money to inflate the share price.
Thats the bits I can remember. I enjoyed the film and show it to my sociology classes but the extent of the corruption was far beyond the “smartest guys” and this wasn’t really drawn out well enough I didnt think.
Cheers
Shane
31 August 2006, 6:50 pmJames M:
“I seem to remember reading somewhere that more than half of whistleblowers are female …”
Interesting. Yeah, the first two names to spring to my mind when the word “whistleblower” is mentioned are Colleen Rowley and Sibel Edmonds.
Not to say these women wouldn’t have spoken out if they were working under a more egalitarian regime, but it’s fair to say that this is what the Boy’s Club gets for being exclusionary … the excluded employees (the ones with any self-respect, anyway) have less of a tendency toward (over)conformity.
I guess the question this brings up in my mind is, would a less-male-dominated Enron have gone to such excess? How integral was this insular male culture to their criminality?
I have some ideas, but I’ve gotta get back to work on my own documentary
.
31 August 2006, 9:11 pmStan:
Yolanda brought womething up at a conference we attended together that has stuck with me… like, every day since then. She said, there is no such thing as a heterosexual woman. Here’s the rest… Since nothing in the social conditioning that is institutionalized as compulsory heterosexuality is women’s own… it is part of patriarchy, part of the male power structure, that permeates every aspect of our lives from birth; then the sexuality that is female heterosexuality is not her own, whatever is her own is lost, disappeared, cut off from her existence, like the X that Malcolm X took as his last name to stand in for the history that his own nation had taken away from it. Heterosexuality is a social construction within an all-pervasive male-rule, and so there is no way to know, in the actually-existing world, what the sexuality of autonomous women might be.
In the same way, I have to wonder if there is any way to separate criminality, of any kind, from male criminality… either in definition or practice. There are no boundaries for what is pervasive, and so we cannot draw a boundary around any action that happened within patriarchy and reasonably ask could the same thing, with the exception of male power, have happened differently. in the absence of male domination, nothing would be the same. Nothing.
31 August 2006, 10:54 pmJames M:
Yeah, I realized seconds after hitting “submit” that a “less-male-dominated Enron” is something next-to-impossible to conceive of or speculate about, given the radical change of social context, the overturning of so many of the underpinnings of what passes for normalcy that would be required to produce it.
But I’ll forgive myself for asking an apparently dumb question like that, because I guess sometimes that’s what’s required in order to make a lightbulb go on & illuminate how deeply, pervasively entrenched patriarchy is … including within one’s own psyche.
31 August 2006, 11:37 pmDeAnander:
Veblen touches on this — verbosely! — in his classic Theory of the Leisure Class… in which he describes the values and morals of the upper classes as an historical holdover from “the barbarian epoch” of unmitigated patriarchy and conquest. it’s a lengthy and in parts naif argument, but I think he was onto something.
to summarise his work (which really deserves a leisurely read for its sly sarcasm): the leisure class tends to be culturally conservative and to preserve anachronistic values; these values often derive from a barbaric, conquest-oriented epoch in which the only virtuous or worthy activities for upper class males are hunting and fighting, and mundane labour is disdained; hence the upper classes inherit a contempt for honest work and a cultural preference for predation — conquest or theft, whether by guile or force. this places their values in direct contradiction to the values of the industrialised polity, in which conformity, reliability, probity and workmanship are pre-eminent. it also places them in conflict with “natural” human values like the pride of workmanship and an abhorrence of waste, and with the reciprocal altruism which cements community.
Veblen is struggling to explain anachronistic beliefs and practises, conspicuous consumption, ridiculous gaps between use value and market value, and other cultural manifestations which “don’t make sense” in the early decades of industrial capitalism in America.
he even touches on gender and the position of the upper-class woman as a display object, perpetuating vicarious consumption on behalf of the dominant upper-class male; and he talks about the dysfunctional dispersal of upper-class values downward through the society by emulation of “reputability.” I can’t really do justice to his sardonic view of turn-of-the-previous-century America — his analysis of the clergy (and their vestments) as vicarious consumers for the ultimate aristocracy of God, alone, is worth the effort of wading through his sonorous and sometimes lumbering prose. the book is by turns hilarious in a manner reminiscent of Swift or Twain, and tedious like the last volume of Gibbon (where the elegance of the prose seems not only to have drowned any interesting content, but shot, stabbed, and poisoned it for good measure and buried the body in an unmarked grave).
anyway… certainly he was on to a correlation between the “manly” values of hunting and fighting, and the criminal values of looting, deceiving, and stealing. much of hunting and fighting consists of deceiving and outwitting the prey/enemy; hunting and warfare are viewed in dominant western culture like other extractive activities, as a form of looting (“to the victor belong the spoils” etc). both are considered more manly, more noble and more prestigious than tedious, humdrum honest labour. and criminals often consider themselves superior to (and more Manly than) “idiots” who don’t try to game or cheat the system or prey on neighbours.
the obvious application of a hunting and fighting ethic in the realm of commerce is force and fraud; the absurd overconformant masculinism of the Enron gang is part and parcel of their “criminality” — criminality being a word for overconformant masculine behaviour manifested in ways the State disapproves of as opposed to ways it approves of (such as wars of aggression and occupation or mailfist suppression of dissent).
the risible pseudo-Darwinism to which the Enron honchos subscribed lends a thin ideological/intellectual veneer to their basic faith in bullyism…
how the world would be in the absence of male domination is… well… unthinkable, though some have tried. Utopian feminist sci-fi has attempted to paint us worlds either without men altogether, or with men so reformed and civilised that patriarchy is a thing of the past. this might be an interesting thread sometime: Utopian feminist worlds and our critique of them.
the sf writer CJ Cherryh invented a sentient species and their culture once in which sexual dimorphism was marked and males were more innately aggressive, larger, fiercer, and more territorial. however, this led to their being deemed unstable and traditionally denied participation in political/public life except in a ceremonial capacity
the life of the males in this hypothetical culture was centred in the home (their jealously guarded turf), where their innate aggression was turned usefully towards defence of the young and the elderly. the public life of the polity was conducted by adult females. she based the life form roughly on African lions, as far as I can tell.
the point of this digression is merely that even if we were to admit sexual dimorphism and, say, a link between testosterone and aggression as biological facts about hominids, we could still imagine cultural answers to those problems far different from the familiar answers of patriarchy…
1 September 2006, 1:36 amjay taber:
Criminality, more than anything else, demands our attention at present, but I think we have to summon the resolve to say we want it back–all of it–everything this Congress and White House and their friends have stolen. To say that it is not enough to vilify or incarcerate a few individuals.
If our vision is for total social inclusion–education, healthcare, and work for everyone–then this is how to fund it. Seize all the assets of every politician, lobbyist, and businessman that participated in these felonious enterprises.
What other choice do we have?
1 September 2006, 1:10 pmCharles Brown:
Don’t you think that heterosexuality is instinctive as well as socially constructed ? Surely, it was instinctive for our primate ancestors, as they had no social construction , and would have gone extinct without it. When and how was that instinct extinguished ?
In other words, how is it that you conclude that women don’t have heterosexual instinct ? which would be expressed in a society without male supremacy, which _was_ expressed in the human societies that lacked male supremacy ?
1 September 2006, 2:28 pmTimothy R. Anderson:
The main thing missing from the Rumsfeld / Cheney / Bush ” Let’s Stay The Course ” campaign is the SOVEREIGNTY of Iraq. The greed of men like ( business-men ) Ken Lay, Donald Trump, and …… well, multi-millionaire Rumsfeld …… that GREED requires an ongoing, thorough DENIAL OF REALITY. President Bush himself, during the final days of June 2004 , acknowledged repeatedly that the nation of Iraq is now sovereign. The official date of transfer was June 28, 2004 . Then, as time passed, President Bush said the sovereign nation of Iraq would have thousands upon thousands of foreign soldiers ( and private security guards ) stationed on the ground in Iraq. Uh, how stupid does Washington D.C. think the typical American adult is ? Well, I do not know the answer to THAT. What I do know is that a U.S. Marine said ” War Is A Racket. ”
U.S. Marine Smedley Butler said ” War is a racket.”
Please read about Butler and consider adding your name to the petition at http://www.warisaracket.org
If you think spending our American blood and spending our American treasure in far off lands is a good thing, well, by all means, keep the status quo.
The next generation of Americans will, uh, remember you , uh, interestingly.
Timothy R. Anderson
1 September 2006, 2:31 pmMark:
A very well done review; however, I must admit that it’s pages [and comments] like this that make me yearn for Joe Bagent.
-Mark
3 September 2006, 3:27 pmDeAnander:
I happen to enjoy reading Bageant from time to time — modulo his aggressive macho posturing (boyshit or dickspeak or whatever we’re calling it this week) and his leanings towards a whiteboy populism whose flavour makes me subliminally nervous… he has a wicked turn of phrase and a deep sincere anger behind it, and when he’s in good form his prose has a real snap and sizzle.
4 September 2006, 12:57 am