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february,2002




Cry for us, Enron-Tina
by Frank Scott



While sincere Americans were  waving flags , Washington was picking
their pockets to fill the coffers of corporate capital. At the same
time, this  government has been hysterically destroying the
constitutional  freedoms that make America, with all its moral flaws, a
worthwhile dream of democratic possibility. Most elected officials, with
the cooperation of mass media acting as a propaganda  wing of the state,
have united in a frenzy of thoughtless action alleged to fight terror
elsewhere, but really create it within our midst.

During this orgy of mass financial looting and frenzied civil liberties
theft , the economic horrors of a multi-billion dollar corporation,
Enron, and a multi-multi billion dollar nation, Argentina, haven’t been
closely examined. They reveal more about what might ruin our future than
present fears about retail terrorism practiced by dark-skinned amateurs
, in contrast to the more common wholesale terrorism practiced by
light-skinned professionals.

The capital theft at Enron may eventually lead to individual
prosecutions, but personal crime is only a small part of this case. If
we allow the soft shoes and weak spines of  official opposition to be
the only response to the  cowboy boots and cow-pie brains  of this
administration, we will gain nothing. Some satisfaction for the craven
cowards who called Bush a moron on 9/10, but made him a dictator after
9/11, will simply mean personal vengeance enacted against the mental
minimalist president and his crew of power-mad petro-greasers.This kind
of small time , short term  politics  won’t  protect us from the
big-time,  long term threat .

It is our capital fundamentalism , and well as our chemically dependent,
petroleum addicted energy policy that lie at the root of the Enron
corporate fiasco. The complicity of many within the Bush gang  is only a
sideshow; a focus on their behavior that misses the larger deregulatory
horror responsible for this mess amounts to sending pretzels to the
white house as a way of opposing the president.

While it was mainly a conduit for Republican funding,the cabal of energy
and financial thieves at Enron  dumped off money to the other wing of
our  corporate political mafia and its henchmen , like Joe-God
Leiberman, when it saw the  need for a little help from more than one
criminal gang.

And the national disaster of  Argentina has been the story of everything
supposedly right about the triumph of deregulated capital becoming
everything that is wrong with the disaster of unregulated capital. IMF
policy, which means U.S. free market fundamentalism , was supposedly
working like a charm in Argentina. Sure, until the drugs wore off. Then
the invasion of foreign capital and the destruction of national currency
became a living nightmare of unemployment, poverty, food riots and bank
chaos.

Now, while thousands suffer the system’s losses at Enron, millions
suffer the  system’s deprivations in Argentina, and billions worldwide
are threatened by further breakdowns in global capitalism. But there is
some hope for Argentina;  many of its people have shown  they will no
longer tolerate the  nonsense that created their problems. The new,
temporary government is withholding payments on foreign debt, which
numbers even more billions than the old paper value of Enron. This could
be a  signal to other nations  impoverished by capital to fight back.
And even we Americans show some signs of waking up reality.

Business flacks tell us consumer confidence is  increasing, but this may
be because consumers  realize what Argentineans finally understand ;
they will never be able to pay their debts, which will outlive them, and
they  can’t be prosecuted for incurring them if their debtors  robbed
them in the first place, and they band together to get more power than
those to whom they allegedly owe the money .

It is the system’s total dependence on waste, pollution, deregulation
and debt that is most dangerous, and is the point at which  Enron and
Argentina  offer lessons. This is how things work; for the unprincipled
minority investors, and  against the  majority from whom they draw the
interest they call profit, which is that majority’s loss.

But awareness must come at a faster pace. More victims are sought in  an
endless war against “them”, with dreadful Democrats like presidential
wannabee Leiberman joining the  chorus that sings for murder as the only
way to stop more murder. The popular demon, Saddam Hussein, looms large,
as both American and Israeli  vampires of war thirst for more blood,
having whetted their appetites with Afghanistan’s powerless Taliban and
Palestine’s defenseless citizens.

International corporadoes desire a global empire under the total control
of gas guzzling, environmentally destructive  western civilization, in
its most anti-democratic , fundamentalist form.

The  perverse, greedy onanism of modern  capital is so focused on its
private parts that it denies the larger body of society, which is
composed of  people in numbers far beyond the minority of investors and
corporations on whose selfish interest its goals are focused. It is that
majority which is kept divided by manipulation and teachings that claim
all power to the individual, while robbing those individuals through
governments controlled by wealth ,  which collect taxes  to  fill the
pockets of their owners; the minority corporadoes.

The financial interests which profited from the  crimes of Enron are the
same ones which got fat sucking Argentina dry. And the workers at Enron,
the citizens of Argentina and ultimately all of us are the ones who will
pay. The neo-liberalism of the past thirty years that returned to
primitive capital’s attack on public service  government, with all power
placed in the market under private control, has brought Enron and
Argentina  to near or total ruin. But more importantly, that
unregulated, debtor creating system threatens all people, every nation
and the planet itself if it is not brought under democratic control.
Today Enron-Tina; tomorrow, us?

Copyright (c) 2002 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

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frank scott
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