Synopsis
Enron - born in Texas in 1986 and the 7th largest corporation in the world only fifteen years later. How did it grow so fast? Why did it collapse so spectacularly? Was it a maverick rogue or trail-blazer for a new kind of American capitalism? Fat Cats and Running Dogs tells the global story of Enron, a company that did not produce, but merely traded. This book tells us about: * How new-style US corporations make their money * The buying of politicians * The revolving door between public office and boardroom membership * How the US State Department pressures governments into signing dubious deals * Manipulating the market * Companies securing themselves from risk by monopoly deals with governments to guarantee prices and markets * Omitting to report off-balance sheet losses * Hiding profits in tax havens overseas * Forging improper relationships with auditing firms. Vijay Prashad takes us into some big questions of our time: the mutual backscratching between politicians and corporate executives; the price paid by us as citizens, taxpayers and employees; and the ways in which US corporations rip off the rest of the world.
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From the Publisher
Vijay Prashad is Associate Professor and Director, International Studies at Trinity College. He is the author of two Village Voice books of the year: Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (Beacon, 2001) and Karma of Brown Folk (Minnesota, 2000). He lives in Western Mass.
From the Author
By now we have all read enormous amounts about the shenanigans of Enron, the excesses of the CEO class and the waste that is capitalism. But this rendition of the story fails to address at least two elements of the fall of Enron: (1) the structural role played by Enron as the forerunner among many other firms for the global capital's attack on the Commons; (2) the global story of Enron's activities.
Enron was not simply a crooked firm that defrauded its workers and pensioners. That is far too parochial as a framework. I detail the role played by Enron to enclose that section of the human economy that we have, for fifty years, called the 'public sector.' The zones of water, energy, air, education, and others, had been held off from commodification and held in trust by the state. In the Second Enclosure movement of the 1990s, these zones came under threat from global corporations -- with Enron leading the way. The book tells this story, using the Philippines, India and Argentina as the main examples.
Furthermore, the book is a manual for global conquest -- it offers hints to would-be capitalists that if they want to get to the Enron pinnacle, they need to use the CIA, craft monopoly conditions and hire US government workers just out of the revolving door. This is imperative.
Finally, the book offers a window into the fight over oil and water, over the tensions in Colombia, Afghanistan and Bolivia
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