2010:Whilst I had read the odd piece or two,I did not pay much attention to in-depth investigative journalism.Arriving home one night,I decided to take a look at what was being shown on TV,and I found that the BBC were just about to show a documentary on a company called Enron.With having not heard about Enron before,I expected the doc to be a light- hearted affair which would show the day to day workings of the company.Catching me completely by surprise,the documentary detailed Enron's corrupt dealings piece by piece,with an excellent clarity. 2015:As I approached my 800th review,I decided that it was the perfect time to once again watch what has now become my favourite documentary,and 8th favourite film of all time,as I got set to ask Enron,"Why?"Outline of the documentary:Growing up in a poor house hold ,Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay had dreams of entering the business world.Lobbying in the '80s for the de- regulation of natural gases,Lay takes advantage of the situation,by starting a company called Enron.Two years into Enron's existence,two traders are discovered gambling all of Enron's cash on the oil market.Spotting the loss of millions just in time,Enron is able to keep the losses undercover.Instead of sacking the two traders,Lay tells them to "keep making us millions",which would lead to Enron becoming the seventh biggest company in the US,and eventually lead to Enron (and accountancy firm Arthur Andersen) being the (then) largest corporate bankruptcy in American history,and also the biggest audit failure.View on the film:Covering Enron from Ken Lay's lobbying days in Washington to Enron hitting the previously hidden iceberg in under 2 hours,director Alex Gibney's adaptation of the Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind book The Smartest Guys in the Room - The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron,displays a remarkable precision in placing every piece of the Enron scandal on a table which allows the viewer to approach the subject in an accessible manner.Keeping away from turning the title into a dry lecture, Gibney smartly decides to stay behind the camera and allow for former associates of Enron to do the talking in fascinating interviews,with Gibney and editor Alison Ellwood brilliantly inter-cutting archive footage and a pitch-perfect soundtrack to emphasis some of the most openly corrupt moments in Enron's history.Linking up the time-line of Enron's ("Enron will never fail") collapse, Peter Coyote delivers a wonderful narration,which gives a real gravitas to proceedings.Giving the film a stylish sheen, Gibney closely works with Maryse Alberti to make glass (which is not related to a Philip Glass track being on the soundtrack!) a subtle motif for the film,as Gibney's reflecting glass shows that before the ongoing world-wide financial crisis led to the "too big to fail" banks smashing into a previously hidden iceberg,there was Enron.

I guess the Enron collapse, and the other corporations that collapsed around the same time (such as Worldcom) were sort of a harbinger of the crisis that was to arise in 2008, however just as with the events that surrounded Enron, it seems that the response to the global financial crisis was simply to sweep the problem under the table, make sure the stock market starts rising again, and go on as if nothing had happened. However, the case of Enron is similar to this whole farcical system that is the modern market, and that is that the health of a company is determined by the growth in profits, and in turn the growth in the share price.The funny thing is that we were look at the growth in the share price of a company, or their reported earnings, there is one thing we don't actually see, and that is inflation. There are other ways of increase profits without actually increasing the earnings or the customer base, and that is to cuts costs. One can actually grow profits (and even earnings) without actually increasing the customer base, and that is one of the massive cons of the market. There is much that I could say about this issue, however I think I will simply focus of the Enron fraud in this instance.Enron, like many modern corporations, is effectively a farce. It only exists to make money and its only reported goals are profit growth and its success if measured by the value of the company. However a company's value is a vary dubious quantifier as there is a lot that cannot be measured. A company's value can be measured by the value of its assets and by its actual earnings (which is quantifiable because that can be measured), however one can also add an intangible factor called 'goodwill', which is the reputed reputation of the company, and then there is future earnings. Future earnings, as the name implies, are earnings that may come in in the future, but because they are in the future they are merely speculative. However what Enron did was to base its current value on these future earnings though a method called mark to market accounting. The problem is that if these earnings don't arise then the value of the company comes into question.However, what Enron did was that they kept on creating these wonderful ideas and deals (such as bandwidth trading, which never eventuated, or video on demand, which also did not eventuate as the technology was not sufficient to allow at at that time), and when they began to dry up, they began to manipulate the market itself. This is thus the cause of the California rolling blackouts. It was not that deregulation did not work, it is that deregulation was being exploited to drive up the price of electricity. Power plants were being shut down, and blackouts and brownouts created to create the appearance that there was not enough power, and in response the price of electricity was being forced up. I remember that at the time we were simply watching it as the failure of deregulation, however as it turned out it was a lot more sinister than that.What is interesting though is that this documentary reminded me a lot of the Wolf of Wall Street, however this had a much stronger focus on the human cost and the actions of the people at the top of the tree, were as the other film was more glamorising what was in effect a crocked and greedy individual.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a documentary based on the best- selling book of the same title by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind.It is a study of one of the largest business scandals in American history. McLean and Elkind are credited as writers of the film alongside the director, Alex Gibney.The documentary examines the collapse of the Enron Corporation, which resulted in criminal trials for several of the company's top executives; it also shows the involvement of the Enron traders in the California electricity crisis. The film features interviews with McLean and Elkind, as well as former Enron executives and employees, stock analysts, reporters and the former Governor of California Gray Davis.The documentary opens with a reenactment of the suicide of Enron executive Cliff Baxter, then travels back in time, describing Enron chairman Kenneth Lay's humble beginnings as the son of a preacher, his ascent in the corporate world as an "apostle of deregulation," his fortuitous friendship with the Bush family, and the development of his business strategies in natural gas futures. It points out that the culture of financial malfeasance at Enron was evident as far back as 1987, when Lay apparently encouraged the outrageous risk taking and profit skimming of two oil traders in Enron's Valhalla office because they were bringing a lot of money into the company. But it wasn't until eventual CEO Jeff Skilling arrived at Enron that the company's "aggressive accounting" philosophy truly took hold. The Smartest Guys in the Room explores the lengths to which the company went in order to appear incredibly profitable. Their win-at-all-costs strategy included suborning financial analysts with huge contracts for their firms, hiding debts by essentially having the company loan money to itself, and using California's deregulation of the electricity market to manipulate the state's energy supply. Gibney's film reveals how Lay, Skilling, and other execs managed to keep their riches, while thousands of lower-level employees saw their loyalty repaid with the loss of their jobs and their retirement funds. This is a meticulously researched and ably handled chronicle of one of the largest corporate scandals in American history.Also,it is a deft, entertaining and infuriating documentary about one of the most egregious cases of corporate corruption in American history that one does not require an interest in business affairs to fully appreciate it.Finally,it one will surely get mad when he watches it.

William Muir, an animal breeder at Purdue University, once conducted an experiment in which hens were selected for egg productivity using two different selection methods. The first method involved selecting the most productive hens from different cages to breed the next generation of hens, whilst the second method involved selecting the most productive cages and using all the hens within those cages for breeding.At first glance it may seem as though the first method should prove more efficient. After all, eggs are produced by individual hens, so why not directly select the best? Why select at the group level, when even the best groups may have some individual duds? The results, though, told a completely different story. The first method caused egg productivity to sharply decline, even though the most productive hens were chosen each at every generation. The second method, in contrast, caused egg productivity to increase 160 percent in six generations, an astonishing response as artificial selection experiments go.What happened? In short, the first method favoured the nastiest hens who achieved their productivity by suppressing the productivity of other hens. After six generations, Muir had produced a nation of psychopath chickens, who plucked and murdered each other with their greedy, incessant attacks. In other words, traits that are "for the good of the group" are not always locally advantageous within the group and require a process of group-level selection to evolve.It's the same story in "Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room", a documentary about a nest of continuously promoted corporate psychopaths who fiscally rape shareholders and competitors, before their hatchery completely self-destructs. Unfortunately, like most of these stories, "The Smartest Guys In The Room" never pushes beyond CEOs, managers and complicit middle men (though they are deservedly attacked) to point fingers at what are really systemic problems.In a book titled "Systemantics", John Gall describes the nature of systems, and how they often eventually become living, breathing entities. Not only do they develop a sort of collective consciousness (or intelligence network), but they also develop the desire for growth, and mechanisms of self-preservation. Of course a system can take many forms (a country, an organisation, a religion etc), but in each case they house similar methods of self-preservation. In the case of a country, Patriotism is the mechanism of self-preservation. In an organisation, it is allegiance to a cause. In a religion, it is faith. In all cases, the adherents are bound within a collective organisational consciousness.Eventually the ego-like qualities of this organisational consciousness cause each system to lust for even greater power. Greater power in turn requires more personnel, which requires even larger budgets, which in turn leads to a never ending spiral of growth. To justify this growth, these systems have no choice but to abandon the original purpose for which they were created. Thus, a moderate original goal must be replaced with a lofty objective embalmed in complex terminology that is designed to sound virtuous (in Enron's case, betting on off shore oil to keep shareholders happy). The elimination of evil, anarchy, crime, and war are just some buzzwords used to cover a drive for acquiring or maintaining power. In all cases, the objective requires growth.This documentary damns Enron, but government bureaucracies play Enron's game as well. In the case of countries (today, of the largest 100 economies on the planet, 51 are corporations and not countries), the lack of profits which would keep a private company in check does not serve as a restriction for a system that can extract taxes as needed from a captive regional or global population. Even if commercial activity declines as a result of excessive taxation, the tax supported systems continue to grow (and often currencies are then expanded worldwide in a global competition of debasement). And as taxes increase, so too must patriotism by a corresponding amount to avoid insurrection. In some cases, the practical justification for a tax supported system disappears all together, leaving behind nothing but the naked lust for power. With its own language, its own culture, and its own survival mechanisms, the system then feels that complete domination is the only objective worthy of its inflated sense of Self. End result: the world falls under the control of tax supported psycho chickens who have the strength, and the motive, to rob almost every person on the planet...until they don't, and we laugh at them with documentaries like this.8/10 - Worth one viewing.