by Robert Crook

Like Michael Moore's documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," there's a lot packed into the documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room." And like "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Enron" won't tell you much that you didn't know already if you follow the news, but it neatly puts the whole seedy saga all into one place.

California figures prominently in "Enron."

I was pissed off, and you will be, too, to hear the recorded phone conversations of Enron traders plotting the rolling blackouts in California in order to drive up energy prices for Enron and bilk Californians, including "Granda Millie," out of billions of dollars. The Enron traders laugh about retiring early with the millions they'll make by bilking Californians, and one of them contemptuously remarks that he hopes that there's a huge earthquake that causes California falls into the ocean. (Which is pretty stupid, because why would you kill your cash cow?)

"Enron" will even make you feel for the uncharismatic Gray Davis, because it's clear that the oily Texas Republicans intended to create a bogus energy crisis in California in order to politically harm Davis. It's fairly clear that the Republican operatives figured that the combination of Davis being charismatically challenged and the wholly fabricated California energy crisis would bring Davis down.

And who would "save" us?

Action-hero he-man Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, "Enron" reminds us, met with Enron head crook Kenneth Lay on May 17, 2001, at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles.*

"Enron" will make you feel even for Davis because it's clear that he got screwed. (For the record, I voted for Green Party candidate Peter Camejo for governor in 2002, but the 2003 Republican-orchestrated gubernatorial recall election pissed me off because Davis was the duly elected governor and the recall election was no more than a do-over because the Republicans had made the mistake of picking the bumbling Bill Simon to oppose Davis in 2002.)

And "Enron" will make you hate Schwarzenegger more than you already do, because while he was promising during the gubernatorial recall campaign to "save" California, he had met with the man who had tried to destroy California by bilking us out of billions of dollars.

While there's plenty to piss off a Californian in "Enron," there is also Barbara Boxer grilling Enron top crook Jeff Skilling. The only moment of triumph that a Californian can feel while watching "Enron" is watching Barbara's weasel-boxing. (Can we please please please clone Barbara Boxer? It feels so good to be able to like a Democrat. I should mention California Rep. Henry Waxman also as one of California's defenders in "Enron." I wish he were my representative.)

While I took in "Enron" I couldn't help but make the connection between the management style of the Enron crooks and that of the Bush regime. (The film doesn't make this connection explicitly, but a thoughtful person can easily extrapolate it.)

The mentality of the Enron crooks was to get as much as they could while they still could, and when their house of cards came tumbling down, to leave the suckers holding the bag.

The mentality of the members of the Bush regime similarly has been to get as much as they can for themselves and their corporate buds while they still can, and when the spoiled rich white frat boys gone wild are done trashing the place, we suckers will have to pick up the pieces of the many things that they broke.

George W. Bush started out with a huge federal budget surplus. By giving the rich tax cuts and by creating his bogus war in Iraq for his war-profiteering corporate buds (Halliburton and the many other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp), Bush II quickly turned the surplus he inherited to a record federal budget deficit, which he blames on 9/11 and the "war on terror" -- 9/11 changed everything, don'tchya know.

Just as Enron had problems showing how it actually earned the stellar profits that it fraudulently reported, billions of U.S. taxpayers' dollars that have been sucked into the war-profiteers' black hole that is Iraq haven't been accounted for.

But that's not enough, because the word "enough" is not in the money-grubbing weasel's vocabulary; Bush wants to hand Social Security over to the money-grubbing weasels of Wall Street.

When all is said and done, Bush will have left office having put the nation into deep, deep debt but having made his filthly rich buds even richer. Gee, is that anything like what the top crooks at Enron did?

To rub salt into the wound, Bush not only will leave my generation and the generation(s) after mine with a mountain of debt, but he will leave behind him God knows how many Iraqis and other Muslims who will want revenge upon Americans for the thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqis that the United States has slaughtered since the Bush regime's illegal, immoral, unprovoked and imperialist March 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Not that we couldn't have seen this coming: As a businessman, George W. Bush ran his corporations into the ground and escaped unscathed, leaving others holding the bag.

Will we learn before it's too late? And when, if ever, will the George W. Bushes, Kenneth Lays and Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the world not escape and get the scathings that they deserve?

Robert Crook spouts off regularly on his Salon weblog, Robert's Virtual Soapbox, at http://blogs.salon.com/0001517/.

*For more on this, see
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=283&row=1