enron the smartest guys in the room free

Enron the smartest guys in the room free professional#

As McLean says in the movie, the story of America's biggest corporate collapse is not about numbers - as massively fraudulent as Enron's earnings turned out to be - it's a human drama and a human tragedy. I don't want to complain overmuch about Gibney's 'Enron' film, which is based on the outstanding book 'The Smartest Guys in the Room' by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. Someone more dispassionate than I might argue that there are further similarities between talk radio and lefty agitprop movies (I hesitate to call them documentaries): Both could be seen as making valid points about the nature of power in America - the oligarchic power of the elite establishment or the quasi-fascistic power of big capital, as the case may be - that become dangerously clouded by ideological zeal and the quest for entertainment value. Like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, these kinds of movies - which mostly play in art-house theaters in major cities and college towns - reach an audience almost exclusively composed of like-minded people. But the legacy of Michael Moore's unlikely box-office smash is likely to be a long one muckraking nonfiction films like Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar's 'The Corporation' or Alex Gibney's new 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room' are becoming the left wing's answer to talk radio.

Enron the smartest guys in the room free professional#

Most of all, it’s an excellent demonstration of what happens when professional ethics are allowed to take a back seat to making money.If you thought the cascade of post-'Fahrenheit 9/11' agitprop films had slowed to a trickle after last fall's election, you're probably right. It will help you fully understand why there are so many confusing accounting rules. If you want to understand the world of finance, watching this documentary breaks it down into nail-biting details.

And it follows the trials of the company leaders as they faced criminal charges for their actions. This documentary describes in vivid detail how Enron employees contributed to the problem and what was done in the aftermath to prevent this sort of disaster in the future. The effects of the Enron scandal were widespread. California was forced to purchase more power from neighboring states, which contributed to the budget woes that eventually helped force the governor out of office. The company had become so enamored of its own power that it began tinkering with the power supply, causing the rolling blackouts in California that were initially blamed on excess consumption. But evidently, there was even more involved. I had been aware that the Enron meltdown had to do with “cooking the books,” according to the buzzphrase going around at the time. These headlines seem unrelated, but the documentary shows that not only are they related, but in the aftermath, also just how ridiculous they both are, and how neither ever should have happened.

January 24: 'Bush Adds 2 Weeks to Orders Ensuring California Power: But No More Extensions State is Warned That it Must Line Up Enough Electricity on its Own After Feb.

January 23: 'Enron Earnings Up 34% in 4th Quarter '.It was really big news.Ī couple of headlines in the New York Times from 2001: It was impossible to ignore complete, however. I was well into adulthood when the Enron scandal broke in 2001, but because they were on the other end of the state and I didn’t do any business with them that I was aware of, I didn’t pay much attention at the time. To kick things off, we watched the documentary Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room, based on the book by Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean. My professor thought ethics was so important it was the first thing he covered. I took a class in Business Law a few years ago.