These acts of corporate rapaciousness make it clear how easily ordinary citizens can be hurt when executives try to make money 'creatively' by moving money rather than producing a product or fulfilling a real service. Enron is often mistakenly called an energy company, but it was really more of a speculative entity. This is another illuminating aspect of the documentary for those viewers who may only know about the Enron debacle through the popular media. The company existed only to show profits on its balance sheet, and to do so it tried 'every trick in the book' to keep its stock price high.
One of the most shocking revelations is how the Enron Company single-handedly created the California energy crisis: in case anyone is wondering why nothing has been said about the crisis since Enron folded, is because there never was a real crisis. The documentary has conclusive proof that Enron encouraged California power plants managers to shut down the plants, to drive up the price of electricity, indifferent to the personal suffering and profit losses for untold numbers of people that this caused. The current market melt-down is testimony to how easily fortunes can be won and lost on paper, but the Enron example is even worse because the company actually engaged in criminal activity, like a kind of white collar terrorist shutting down power.
It is hard not to feel sympathetic when the movie reports how the orchestrators of the fraud, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling,...
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