With the bevy of Bernie Madoffs and other Captains of Corruption you could easily forget the scale of corruption that Enron represented just a few years ago. Up to that time the idea of a Fortune 50 company based on absolutely nothing was unthinkable. What this penetrating documentary does is expose the scale of that corruption and how the amoral culture of Enron, flowing from the top, affected everyone and everything about the company. If you don't think that personal ethics, character and morality are relevant in a corporate context; that somehow the market will weed out the grossly immoral through the "magic of free markets", think again. How anyone with a VP or higher title from this company is employable anywhere in this country as something other than a cleaning person is infuriating.
Even more disturbing is the lack of regulatory response to this, or perhaps worse the creation of an accounting regime that added enormous costs to well-run honest businesses but did nothing to address the real underlying issues of Enron. As we now stare over the precipice and look at the abyss that similar institutions have brought us to the brink of, and then contemplate that even now no real regulatory reform has been enacted that would prevent such a crisis from happening again, you begin to realize what toothless dogs the regulatory agencies have become.
One word of caution. I bought this product thinking it was a simple documentary. It is, but with a lot more language and other items that are more frequently found in non-documentary fare. That part of this was unnecessary and caught me off guard.Get more detail about ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM.
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