𝘌𝘯𝘳𝘰𝘯: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘎𝘶𝘺𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘰𝘰𝘮.

Kent’s Recommended Watch:
Alex Gibney:
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted today of fraud and conspiracy in their attempts to hide Enron’s losses from investors. Read the FoxNews article.

Coincidentally, I finally got this documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room from Blockbuster, after waiting six weeks to see it. I watched it Tuesday. It’s pretty fascinating; it’s another cautionary tale of good old fashioned greed taking over good old fashioned capitalism.

The folks who ran Enron really just wanted to make lots of money, didn’t care how they did it so long as they could get away with it, and did… with help from the SEC, several prominent investment banks, the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, and every shareholder who only looked at Enron’s soaring stock prices and never asked what the basis was for this continuing upward climb. It was also entertaining to watch Enron’s energy traders mess with California during our recent energy crisis. (The documentary claims they created the problem; I think we created our own problem by botching energy deregulation, allowing Enron to easily take advantage.)

One of the people I watched this with was stunned at how much Enron got away with—and how much complicity went on in order to enable Enron to get away with it. But human evil never surprises me anymore. One learns to expect it, especially when humans are tempted with tremendous sums of money or power. The amazing thing is when they aren’t corrupted by it. The amazing thing is when people voluntarily give up power. That’s what we find so unbelievable; I have no trouble with the idea of people trying to seize more and more until it becomes their undoing.

I should warn you though. Parts of this video should be renamed Enron: The Most Gratuitous Nudity Ever Seen in a Documentary. There’s a bit in the middle about a Enron executive named Lou Pei who had a thing for strippers, and the documentarians decided some good images to show in the background might be that of topless strippers. So think twice before using this documentary in a classroom.