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The Gift That Keeps Giving |
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Written by Scott Meadow
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Monday, 09 August 2004 (read 1264 times) |
Well a scant two and a half years after fucking thousands of workers
out of their retirement money, Ken Lay, the man at the helm of the
Enron collapse, was allowed to turn himself in to a local FBI field
office and hire a room full of attorneys to represent him at an
upcoming show trial. He's been indicted on 11 criminal counts,
including conspiracy, securities fraud and bank fraud, but don't worry:
before the ink dries on the court briefs, he'll be out on parole and
back at one of his mansions. I'm sure he's got a servant to two to
handle any community service. Thank Ashcroft, justice has finally been
served! Someone remember to fax over the U.S. Criminal Code to the
Iraqis, before I forget. I'm sure there's a lot
there they could use. (Clap. Clap. … Clap.)
It's not like Lay (ironic name for a guy who fucked everyone isn't it?)
is the only white collar white criminal in America. There are
enough of them these days to form their own golf circuit.
They all seem to follow a similar pattern too: they steal $500 million
or something in shady, illegal deals and finally get caught after
looting the company. They get hit with $200 million in fines and
penalties, "the biggest in U.S. history" - it's always "the biggest in
U.S. history" - and go on Barbara Walters and cry that they're
down to their last Aspen mansion. Everyone in the media jumps
around celebrating the decision, in the best corpo-populist tradition,
saying how the "bad guys got theirs" and then Michael Jackson crawls
out from one of his palaces someplace and feels up a Dalmatian and not
even WW-III would knock that off Page 1. The next day, we all go
back to our McJobs and wait for our next 3% McRaise.
BUT THE ASSHOLE STILL MADE $300 MILLION, ISN'T ANYONE FUCKING HOME?!
Whoever said that crime doesn't pay didn't work in Modern Corporate
AmericaTM. What's the lesson here,
Spanky? You can make a few hundred million by being a crooked,
lying thieving bastard, but thousands of workers will excoriate you in
the press for a few weeks. Guess which side of The Force is gonna
win here, Luke? No wonder MBA programs are having a tough time
keeping up with applications.
The fact that people don't make an issue out of this means that either:
a) they weren't paying attention, or b) they're so cynical about the
process in the first place, that it's a nonevent when these crooks get
away with it. So let's talk about cynicism.
I think if you want to understand what would make the public so cynical
about justice, I don't think you need to go much further than O.J. Simpson,
sans the race card they tried to convince us was the only thing keeping
him in a holding cell. The Juice could have been purple, it
wouldn't change the obvious fact that he who can affordeth the best
lawyers, can buyeth his freedom. Justice may be blindfolded, but
she's definitely peeking when a few million dollars walks in flanked by
lawyers in $5,000 suits. And the NEXT thing she feels, well,
nobody even offers her a reach around.
Want another reason why people might be cynical? Lay (that still
kills me…) made $217 million selling Enron stock while he was telling
everyone how great the company was doing, and all the time the place
was going down faster than Monica Lewinsky after a triple
espresso. His defense for this was the classic "he didn't know
what was going on" with the day-to-day operation of his company.
So, either this guy's a big ass liar or he's utterly incompetent, in
either case he's not exactly a Wharton School case study of executive
leadership. Time will tell if The Reagan
DefenseTM can work outside the Gordon Gecko
eighties. My guess is that it's alive and kicking, unlike, of
course, Reagan.
It's pretty sad that THIS is what we've come to expect out of the
corporate leaders who pay everyone and own everything… that is for the
few seconds when we're NOT being told how totally incompetent our
elected leaders are - the people WE GET TO VOTE
for - and, therefore, how vastly better private power is in running the show over accountable, elected leaders (told to us, shockingly, by those same corporate interests).
That's the contradiction here, isn't it: yeah, the corporate elite may
be corrupt, but government's no better, so it's a wash. What are
you going to do? Choose who you prefer fucking you, and shut up
about it. Since this sucks, isn't this really a negation of all
forms of elite authority? As much as we believe
that here at IRREVERENT, I think there's
something else at work here. I'm convinced that it goes to the
central contradiction in this American Mad Science
ExperimentTM: democracy is a very scary thing,
and yet, like Fox Mulder, We Want To Believe.
What do I mean? I mean, that the idea of self-rule - that
political power is derived by the consent of the governed - is a great
thing to drag out in a stump speech, but a whole lot more difficult
than leaving control with the rich and powerful already drunk with
their sense of absolute power and "God-given" entitlement.
Outrageous, right? Okay, let's talk about jury duty.
Here we've simultaneously decided that the single best way to dispense
justice to our citizens is by picking out a bunch of slobs at random
from the populace and then placing our fate, sometimes our very lives,
in their hands, while at the same time doing everything in our power to
avoid showing up for duty. Give me a list of 12 of your friends
who are dying to sign up for jury duty and I'll show you a dozen people
with less creative imagination than Pauly Shore AND Carrot Top
COMBINED. These are people simply too stupid to come up with
convincing excuses.
Clearly, you need to find better friends. And, clearly, this is
what we as a society agree with philosophically yet despise in
practice. A sticky wicket, isn't it? And yet, it's at the
very heart of our problem: we love the idea of The
People being in charge, but at the same time we're afraid of what might
happen if we actually were. (Somehow that fear stuck in our heads...hmm.)
See, employee committees don't run Fortune 500 companies. Groups
of average civic-minded citizens, picked from places all around the
country, don't occupy the White House. Teams of regular guys and
gals don't call the shots at the Federal Reserve. Each member of
congress is paid an average salary of $158,000 a year and 50% of
working Americans make less than $36,000. Less than 1/3 of the
voting age populace actually votes. Guess what, smiley? The
people aren't in charge.
And so what are we left with: Ken Lay walking off with a few hundred
million of our dough, a President who hands over the entire national
infrastructures of foreign nations we've bombed into submission
straight to private American stockholders, and millions of fresh new
McJobs with no health plan to replace $40/hour careers with full benefits.
Whew, well, no wonder the people are scared to rule themselves!
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