In reading the article by William Greider, Crime in the Suites, from thenation.com, I felt that it wasn’t possible to be shocked or appalled by anything new to come out of the Enron scandal. It turns out that assumption was very wrong. While the public is crying out at transgressions of Jeff Skilling, former CEO of Enron, this is by no means the first time that the public has been duped by a large corporation, a consulting firm, and the independent directors who are supposed to watch the CEO’s of these companies. As outlined in the article there have been three other notable examples of a company being mismanaged, the bottom falling out, and the CEO and board of directors selling their stock for huge sums before the price plummeted. Lucent, Global Crossing and Sunbeam, should have prepared everyone for something like Enron; yet it still caught many people off guard. Why? The deceit, deception and moral decay that allows people to pull off these staggering crimes has seeped into all levels of business. Wall street alone doesn’t have enough power to pull off this kind of snow job, and as outlined in this article, they had help “Corrupt accountants and investment bankers now have a friendlier commissioner at the SEC--lawyer Harvey Pitt, whose firm has represented Arthur Andersen, each of the Big Five and Ivan Boesky, whose fraud case was settled for $100 million. Pitt blames Arthur Levitt's inquiries for upsetting the accounting industry's self-regulation. Given his connections, Pitt should not just recuse himself from the Enron case--a crisis of legitimacy for the SEC--he should be compelled to resign. Similarly sympathetic cops are scattered throughout the regulatory agencies. At the Federal Reserve, a new governor, Mark Olson, headed "regulatory consulting" in Ernst & Young's Washington office.” Meanwhile, the “Big Five” accounting firms are as guilty and culpable as any government official. The Big Five are paying huge amounts of money to settle court cases so fast that I can’t name them here.

At this point normal corrective measures just won’t work. The amounts of money involved boggle the mind; yet affect the workingman on a personal level as he can watch his retirement disappear. Government intervention is never the answer. Letting these dishonest people on Wall-Street police themselves clearly is out of the question. However if the public stops trusting these firms with their money, cutting off the blood supply to the heart of this criminal organization (and that is what this is without a shadow of a doubt) if you will; then these firms will be unable to function. If we do not invest, they can’t commit fraud, perjury and any other crime short of murder you can come up with. The people actually control their own money, but because we give it to them, we leave ourselves vulnerable. However much it might work, I fear that this is just a pipe dream. And I wait in fear for the “next” Enron to happen. Of course someone on Wall Street already knows that it is coming; they just won’t tell us until it’s too late.