Crime and Punishment and Enron

The collapse of Enron was perhaps the most spectacular financial scandal in the last century. Enron was – on the surface – one of the most stable and powerful businesses in the market, but they used a marketing system known as Mark to Market, this allowed them to manipulate their projected gains in money and essentially allowed them to make up their profits and gains. I could spend a very long time detailing all of Enron's crimes, but it is far more succinct to say that Enron was a company heralded by many as the most innovative company in the world, but it simply got too greedy. One instance of the CEOs of Enron got too greedy was that they had preposterous ideas such as trading bandwidth and even weather. How on earth one can think that there would be a market in trading weather is far beyond me, it is also indicative of an excess of hubris, an excess shared by nearly all the CEOs of Enron, Jeff Skilling in particular.

Jeff Skilling was thought to be one of the most creative and intelligent businessmen in the world. I find it hard to disagree with that statement; Skilling certainly was intelligent, as well as creative. Skilling's fatal flaw was that he had certain insecurities (at one point in the film, they mentioned that he was a perfect example of a nerd who had transformed himself into something new, and was determined to make a difference), and that in order to compensate for said insecurities, he puffed up his ego to the point where there was practically nothing left but ego. It is always disappointing to see somebody with so much natural talent go to waste, as is the case with Jeff Skilling. He is currently serving time (24 years) in a federal prison in Minnesota.

I feel that the main way that Enron connects to Global Ethics is that in most of the other documentaries we've watched, humans have been exploiting the planet, and indirectly harming other humans, but in Enron, humans were clearly exploiting other humans the same way so many other companies exploit nature. The point is that corporations are designed to value profits more than anything else, whatever the cost. Other businesses do it daily and nightly, they are draining the planet of it's resources and beauty in order to make a buck. Enron simply brings this point home by illustrating to us that it can effect us directly as well.