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Enron-o-Rama: From Scandal to Spectacle

By Rob WalkerPosted Thursday, Jan. 24, 2002, at 12:32 PM ET

Whether you think the story of Enron is a political scandal, a business scandal, both, or neither, that story has just reached a critical turning point. Yes, there's a slew of congressional hearings starting today, and that's part of what I'm talking about. But the real sign of where this is all heading comes with the startling appearance of Al Sharpton.

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You don't usually see Sharpton's picture in the business pages, but there he is in this morning's New York Times (or the national edition, anyway). "Somebody," Sharpton announced in the course of a news conference at RJ's Rib Joint in Houston yesterday, "needs to step forward and call the government to bail out the victims." The story goes on to note that Jesse Jackson plans to be in Houston today. "I think one thing Ken Lay and President Bush should agree on," Jackson told the Times, "is that these workers need to be made whole."

I certainly don't deny Sharpton and Jackson the right to involve themselves in any public issue they want, and I'm not here to bash either man's political agenda. But their appearances in Houston strike me as pure opportunism. I can't imagine how it helps, and in fact it seems most likely to prod along the conversion of a spectacular fallen-business story into a mere circus, not so much Enrongate as Enron-o-rama.

It's pretty unusual for a business story to get this kind of treatment, and that's just as well. I've argued before that the focus in figuring out what went wrong at Enron—and you'll notice that almost every reasonable story on the subject makes passing mention of the fact that we still don't actually know what went wrong—ought to remain on the company and on its auditors. That focus ought to get progressively narrower and more sober. Instead it seems likely that it's going to get progressively more vague and sensational as Enron's fall becomes the poorly understood backdrop to a lot of hot sound bites.

What does it really mean to "bail out the victims" of Enron? What does it mean to suggest that its workers should be "made whole"? Should those victims be reimbursed in cash at $90 a share for their slaughtered Enron stock? But if Enron was "a house of cards," as everyone is fond of saying now, then weren't those shares actually worthless all along? Or should we appoint a blue-ribbon panel to figure out what ENE was really worth? And while we're at it, what about the various victims of failed companies whose CEOs don't have presidential nicknames? If I'm not mistaken, other firms' shares have collapsed; other firms have laid many thousands of people off; other firms have fallen to pieces amid suspect accounting, delusional business models, or even fraud. In the process, many, many helpless victims have been created. Who gets bailed out? Who gets made whole?

I'm obviously not a defender of Enron or its management, and I think it's a shame that so many of its workers paid a high price for questionable decisions that were well beyond their control. I've written before that corporate leaders who reap the benefits of their successes also ought to be held accountable for their failures and, if it turns out that they've broken laws, for their misconduct and their lies. Unfortunately, sorting out a story like Enron's requires some patience. Half-baked grandstanding—and the inevitable waves of backlash that it will trigger—does not require any patience at all. Early on, we wanted to get to the bottom of what happened at Enron. Now it seems that everyone just wants to get in on Enron-o-rama.

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Photograph of Al Sharpton by STR/Reuters.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

The sight of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson taking prominent roles in the Enron debate is strange, to be sure; but what's actually coming out of their mouths is even stranger. Glaringly, conspicuously, almost surrealistically, they are not trying to blame George W. Bush. How come? I'm not saying that the President is actually responsible for Enron, mind you; but the reluctance of Jackson and Sharpton to blame him for it is surprising.

Granted, Bush is an extremely popular President at the moment; and there's little or no hard evidence that he had any knowledge of what Lay and his cronies were up to; but would that have stopped (for instance) Tom DeLay from going after President Gore if the circumstances were reversed? I'm guessing not. Jackson is a sharp political operator; but nobody ever accused Al Sharpton of being particularly subtle or patient. One might expect that he, at least, would go for the obvious cheap shots. But so far, at least, he hasn't. It's a mystery. They're not hurting their political enemies, they're not helping their political friends, and they're doing themselves no good in all the world.

So what gives here? Anyone?

--Thrasymachus

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

Isn't there some way we can force the retirement of this tiresome [flies]-to-honey duo? Or at least encourage the major news outlets to stop robotically according these two media exposure? A press conference? Really. Isn't there a statute of limitations (or something) on media enabling of has-been political celebrityism, unless, of course, these people actually have something of significance to say?

--Beverley Mann

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

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