Smells Like Dead Elephants by Matt Taibbi

Author:Matt Taibbi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2014-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

Generation Enron

In George Bush’s America, the only crime is being poor

February 23, 2006

Tuesday morning, January 31, Houston. I’m in the press listening room of the Enron trial, trying to keep track of prosecutor John Hueston’s opening statement. The bespectacled inquisitor is trying, vainly, it seems, to explain to the jury an Enron investment vehicle called Raptor.

“Now imagine that you’ve driven a brand-new truck worth $30,000 into sort of a big barrel,” he says. “The truck drives around in that barrel for a while, then finally crashes and burns and ends up in a heap. Now the truck is only worth $5,000, but Enron is still saying it’s worth $30,000. That’s Raptor . . .”

I sigh and write in my notebook:

Enron: Big rubber barrel full of trucks

Trucks = shitty investments

“You will hear,” Hueston continues, “that they were able to put almost anything in that barrel . . .”

I look back at my notes. Less than fifteen minutes ago, in another prosecutorial scenario, Raptor was a cookie jar. Now I’m wondering: Was it a rubber cookie jar? Were there cookies in the barrel? If so, what size were the cookies, relative to the trucks? Covering the Enron trial is like being trapped in the world’s longest Thomas Friedman column, a Salvador Dalí landscape of violently mixed nightmare metaphors. I shudder, my pie rising.

It was inevitable that the Enron trial would devolve into a verbal jumble. For the defense, obfuscation would be necessary; in order to keep the jury away from the facts, there had to be a lot of talk about steady hands at the helm, sheep running from wolves, and other such self-serving, incoherent bullshit. Therefore, in their opening statements, the defense counsel wasted no time in blinding the jury with crap imagery like “You might think of the admiral of the navy as the CEO . . . An economic storm was raging . . .”

The prosecution had the opposite rhetorical challenge. On the one hand, it had to present to the jury an easily digestible tale of corporate fraud and insider dealing, and indeed it focused heavily on evidence that defendants Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling had dumped millions in company shares just before Enron’s meltdown.

On the other hand, it had to illuminate the fantastic tale of a major public corporation that hid assets and losses in ­hundred-million-dollar shell companies named after Chewbacca from Star Wars, did side deals with phantom companies registered in the name of an officer’s gay lover, and made billion-dollar bets on the Brazilian energy market without remembering to figure in the exchange rate in its calculations. Describing the corruption of Enron is like describing distances in the universe: impossible to express in rational numbers. Hence the barrels and trucks and cookie jars.

All of which set the stage for the Houston trial: two judicial contestants, both speaking in riddles, taking turns trying to explain one of the biggest piles of bullshit in human history.

By all rights, the trial of former Enron chiefs Ken Lay and

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