The black sludge that has been oozing out of Enron for the past several months, contaminating everyone and everything it touches with the oily and unwashable stench of greed, corruption and more greed, has finally attracted the attention of even the most brain dead corporate lapdog reporters this month as the Bush Administration rushes to begin damage control and find some solvent to cut the muck they are now up to their eyeballs in.

And no wonder. With the War of Terrorism moving into a slow motion phase where there isn't even enough action for reporters to sit around in their 5 star hotel rooms and file reports complaining that the Pentagon is denying them access, the continuous demand for news, news, news has finally forced reporters to notice that Enron has transformed itself from the darling of Wall Street worth some 90 billion dollars to a beggar, bargaining for its very existence in a U.S. Bankruptcy court.

The spinmeisters have gone into full twirl mode, denying anything and everything as everyone points the finger of blame at everyone else and the "fixers" move in to destroy as much evidence as they can before the U.S. Marshall arrives. Only, it isn't that easy to hide the disappearance of 90 billion dollars and squelch the wails of widows being dragged into the poor house.

Politicians are running for cover, returning their oil stained campaign contributions to Enron as quickly as their thoroughly corrupted hands can sign the checks. And the Bush ][ Administration is scrambling to bury its deep and profitable relationship with Enron that provided each group with cadres to fill their ranks.

Cries by Administration stooges of "This is how capitalism is supposed to work", seem more and more shrill and more like vain attempts to prevent the poster boy of corporate deregulation from becoming the poster boy of re-regulation. Enron has proved something that we should have learned during the TeaPot Dome Scandal. Capitalists can only be trusted to look out for number one and politicians are for sale to the highest bidder.

The evidence is apparently so damning that the shredders continued to shred long after the subpoenas began to arrive by the truckload. I'm hoping that despite all the cover stories that are now being created by the legion of lawyers, justice will happen.

I imagine the two or three corporate bootlickers that might possibly stumble across this page might complain that it's possible that everything Enron did was legal. Well, bullshit. The intent of Enron's management was to hide billions of dollars of losses and they may have paid enough money to get laws passed making their actions technically "legal". But in my book, Enron actions were nothing more then a massive attempt to deceive its investors and Wall Street and should be considered and treated as outright fraud.

I'm hoping the "aggressive accounting" that Enron used is matched by an equally "aggressive prosecution" and that those bastards responsible are hauled out of Houston in the back of pickup trucks to the highest oil derricks in Texas and hung by the neck until they are dead, dead, dead.

But I'm not very optimistic about that outcome.

You might ask how could this happen? The word is "Greed". Enron's management spread millions of dollars around D.C., buying up every politician not controlled by the mob. Enron got rules rewritten and laws passed. Enron even got to pick its own very friendly regulator when the one in charge actually had the audacity to challenge Enron. And, of course, Enron picked someone that was probably looking forward to several years of meager "government service" that would be probably be better considered as "Enron service", followed by huge paychecks after he left D.C. and returned to the fold in Houston.

For all those millions they "invested" in D.C., the boys that ran Enron walked away with billions.

As this Ponzi scheme unravels and threatens to destroy the most thoroughly corrupted Administration in our existence as a Republic, I can only sit on the sidelines and say "I told you not to vote for those corrupt bastards".

And I'll tell you again. The only way to fix things is to get corporate money OUT of politics. Once that is done and corporate influence diminishes in our legal process, we might be able to get politicians to give a crap about the common man - so unlike money whores that are in office now. Until that happens tho', you can expect more Enrongates and Teapot Domes.

dunsmuir@pigdog.org