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NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2002
Enron fraud exposes capitalist shell game
Oakland, Cal.— The mainstream
press initially saw Argentina and Enron as if they were unrelated stories. To a
worker, these stories are hardly separate or unique. We don’t yet see the same
street demonstrations and worker rebellion here in the U.S. as in Argentina, but
workers at Enron face the same kind of man-made calamities suffered by workers
in Argentina. Workers are made to bail out capitalists after rampant
deregulation, privatization, and globalization schemes fail. Instead of calling it corporate
welfare, they use the euphemism "austerity measures," which means
workers will be bled even further. Enron executive hucksters not only lied to
creditors and authorities alike of their real worth, but committed the lowest
form of fraud by hoodwinking their own employees into investing virtually all of
their retirement savings in Enron. Making mountains of profit out
of California’s energy crisis, everyone was led to believe that there was
nothing but more blue skies ahead. Bush and Cheney even reserved a seat for
Enron on their secret energy task force. Before Enron stocks hit bottom, of
course, the top hucksters were able to unload their holdings, while fine print
locked workers into losing virtually all of their life savings and pensions. If you thought it
couldn’t get any worse than this kind of parasitism at Enron, consider
Polaroid. Workers there were not only encouraged to invest in Employee Stock
Option Plans, they were told that it was the only way to stave off layoffs as a
way to keep the company afloat. Executives didn’t tell workers that they were
maneuvering to prevent a hostile takeover. Given the stark choice of
losing their jobs or accepting the company’s offer, workers were fooled into
choosing the company’s plan and accepted a drastic paycut for these ESOPs. One
worker said Polaroid stock was now worth as much as soda bottle and can
deposits. Marx talked in CAPITAL about
the extraction of surplus labor from workers at the very point of production.
Before the exchange of goods and products, the embryo of all of capital’s
exchange value, and all its contradictions, resides in production of those very
commodities on the production shop floor. Workers are the founding parents of
that original value, as well as its midwife, handmaiden, wet nurse—and
finally, its gravediggers. What Marx analyzed so
meticulously was at the very specifically crucial embryonic stage of development
of this offspring. This prodigal son, the exchange value of abstract labor (what
capitalists like to call market value) from its very inception is the spoiled
brat that sucks the very life out of its own creators, like a parasite. What we
are seeing at Enron and Polaroid however are the adolescent stages of that same
value form. Bush’s idea of tax cuts is
refunding to companies like IBM and Boeing billions of dollars of taxes they had
already paid in the last 15 years. Bush invited corporations to tap dry the
federal surplus—an accumulation of millions upon millions of worker man-hours
of surplus labor extracted over the years. One health care worker said the
same bastards at Arthur Andersen who did the accounting for Enron also for ten
years advised Kaiser as a health care company to divest itself of its healthcare
assets, like clinics and hospitals and workers. Downsizing to become a lean,
mean, efficient healthcare machine was really to be a financial machine at the
expense of patients and employees. That advice got Kaiser in an
organizational crisis when they lost to the tune of $200 million. Outside
vendors were gouging us for care of patients Kaiser was unable to. Kaiser is
only coming out of that crisis by being forced by us workers along with
consumers to reverse much of Andersen’s market "wisdom." One worker
explained, "About the only expertise Andersen is expert in is how to screw
the little people, and how to nosedive a thriving company to the ground. They
really are the economic terrorists of our times." At least Al Qaeda left a trail
of documents and floppy disks and videos of themselves, for evidence at their
own trials. The terrorists at Arthur Anderson however have eliminated much of
the evidence of their deeds in a major shredding campaign. If Congress cannot
see the monumental high crimes and misdemeanors in this, and still insist on
marching in lockstep behind Bush’s combat boots, then they’re even more
brain dead than previously thought. One Puerto Rican immigrant told
me that, to the American people, Argentina’s collapse seemed like a distant
problem, someone else’s crisis. But with Enron, "White middle class
Americans were reduced to the same calamity thought to be suffered only by
people living under crony capitalism in banana republics. They will want heads
to roll." —Kaiser Service worker |
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