Corporate Corruption & Greed - Capitalism & Enron Movies - Movie Match Author - Rowland

With the release of Michael's Moore's Capitalism movie I thought I would share the LoveMovies! review I did on Enron with the theme of corporate corruption and greed. Plus, I added YouTube videos that demonstrate what my five year Ph.D. study also revealed - we now live in a plutacracy (government by the wealthy for the benefit of the wealthy), not a democracy.

That's what Michael Moore's film also clearly reveals. His film totally backs what my own five years of research along these lines on Wealth & Spirituality showed me. Only now instead of 1% of the world's population owning 90% of the world's property and wealth (which I found out in 2004), 1% of the world's population now owns 95% of the world's property and wealth. This statistic is what motivated my Beyond the Secret book and it is why I was saying as early as January 2008 that the present economic system can no longer be sustained.

Here's the review.

Theme: Corporate Corruption & Greed. In 2001, one of America’s largest and most profitable corporations, Enron, an energy company, suddenly went bankrupt. Not long before, CEO Ken Lay had proudly declared, “Enron is a company that deals with everyone with absolute integrity. We want people to leave the transaction with Enron thinking that they’ve been dealt with in the highest possible way in integrity and truthfulness.”

In truth, as the documentary film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room reveals, the success of the corporation was built upon layers and layers of deception. After it crashed, “20,000 employees had lost their jobs, 2 billion dollars in pensions and retirement funds had disappeared.” The film poses the question, “Was Enron the work of a few bad men or the dark shadow of the American dream?” The answer is probably, both!

Enron’s Methods of Corruption

Proclaiming Enron as a profitable company, simply because it had profitable ideas that might hypothetically make money some day.

Using “creative accounting” to help them maintain the illusion of profitability.

Hyping the company’s perceived value through a public relation campaigns that drove up the stock price.

Creating subsidiary companies to hide their losses,

Paying politicians, bankers, accountants and brokers to look the other way.

Essentially raping California of $2 billion dollars by creating a false shortage of energy that left millions without electricity, made energy profits soar, sending most of the profit to Enron.


As the film exposes the Enron was a company filled with people grossly influenced by greed, pride, arrogance, and a shocking immorality. Enron is not alone. Wade Rowland, author of the book Greed, Inc. shows the shocking fact that the modern day corporation is essentially “perfectly egoistic or selfish” with “no moral or cultural limits to its acquisitiveness.” He also says, “Corporations are, in a word, indifferent to right and wrong, good and bad, except insofar as these can be expressed in terms of the corporate equivalents of pleasure and pain – which are profit and loss.”

Perhaps this is why Ken Lay and other former CEO Jeffrey Skilling felt they had done no wrong. This is hardly surprising given what executives are taught in many universities, according to Rowland. “A generalized set of professional management techniques stressed not the product or the customer, but the manipulation of corporate capital to maximize the rate of return on shareholder investment.” This is exactly what Lay, Skilling, and other executives, managers, employees, and traders of Enron had done. Profit mattered more than product, which is something Rowland believes needs to change, along with checks on other corporate abuses.

Roland’s Suggestions For Corporate Change

Eliminating the idea of corporate personhood, which protects the rights of corporations as if they were individual human beings, so they are unaccountable for and social harm they may do in the pursuit of profit.

Subordinating large, publicly traded corporations to government supervision the same way armies are.

“The moral liability of corporate officers and workers needs to be clearly codified into law. And not just for the crimes against the corporation (as in the Enron/WorldCom – inspired Sarbanes-Oxley Act) but for crimes of the corporation” against human beings and the environment for example.

Placing legislative limits on the size and wealth of the corporations.

Denying organizations like the World Trade Organization and the World Bank from seeking advice from corporate leaders who will “not give advice, no matter how necessary or obvious, that can lead to impairment of their financial position.”


As long as the debate about Enron and other corporations remains only about profit, the many dangers corporations pose to our world are ignored. Rowland reports how these abuses include the deaths of thousands of people due to the failure of drug companies like Merck and GlaxoSmithKline to pull dangerous, untested, or even fabricated drugs from the market. Some corporations, like Nike, have been accused of setting up sweat shops with slave-like conditions in third world countries.

“But on another scale altogether is the calculated undermining of international efforts to mitigate what is perhaps the biggest threat ever to have faced humankind – global warming. ExxonMobile, the world’s largest oil company, has been doing exactly that for more than a decade, its ultimate goal being to dissuade the U.S. Congress from signing on to the Kyoto Protocol or in any other way seriously interfering with current fossil fuel production and consumption patterns,” Rowland tells us.

Bottom line, if we are to stop the growing trend of corporate corruption, we will need to rethink the fundamental notion that a corporation exists only to make money for the shareholders. Only in this way will be run not only by the “smartest guys in the room,” but by people with heart, as well as a sense of ethics and concern for the overall good.

IMPORTANT NOTE

This article is Copyrighted as of 2009 by LoveMovies! All Rights Reserved.
Written by Dr. Lisa Love.

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