White collar crime worse than regular kind (enron) 2.7.02

The more I hear about the Enron scandal and the wickedness of its CEO Ken Lay, the more it makes me glad I chose the ethically and morally liberating field of journalism.
Oh sure, you laugh, but most of the bad stuff about journalism comes from your more fringe-y elements in the TV and tabloid segments of the market.
By and large, what goes on in the day-to-day world of the professional journalist is about as questionable as the public's right to know in the first place.
Business may be the business of America, but our puritanical predecessors, the mavens who invented capitalism, would blow succotash if they could see what kind of crimes are committed these days in the name of the almighty dollar.
Marketing defective products, poisoning the environment, buying political favors, relocating American jobs to third world countries, sweatshops... the list goes on.
You see, capitalism used to not exist because capital did not exist. Capital is basically another way of saying "huge, ungodly sums of cash that pretty much give you the power to do whatever you want."
Calvinists, not desiring the base things of this world yet possessed of a work ethic so powerful that children were considered lazy reprobates if they were not permanently doubled over from laboring long hard days in the field by the ripe old age of 10.
As a result, they accumulated massive wealth they had no intention of spending until time passed and the Calvinism wore off of their descendants.
Religious determinism ended and corporations were born and over time, a new ethical question began to form as well.
That question can be more or less summarized thusly, "when a group of people get together and no single one of them can be held accountable for policy, how can the behavior of large groups be controlled."
It is all about control. In our world, we are all controlled by fear, largely, and cash, not so largely. I want to have great sums of money and while I could rob a bank for it, I do not because 1) robbing a bank is wrong and 2) I am a gutless punk afraid of the consequences of my action.
Sure we would all like to believe that we largely do not do things considered wrong because of ethics and morals, but in the final analysis, most people are only able to determine what is right and wrong according to the code of law. If it is in there, it must be moral or immoral according to whether or not you are punished for doing it or not doing it.
The problem with some large corporations we have seen over and over again is that in order to punish a corporation for say, making a car they know is going to kill people, is that to punish the corporation means that many people will be hurt who are not really guilty of anything.
One might well ask, couldn't the single individual in that company be found, blamed, charged and punished? You would think so, but that is the beauty behind corporate responsibility. Plausible deniability.
Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron has been playing both sides of the political spectrum for years. He has a carefully cultivated "good-natured bumpkin" aura about him that most people recognize as false.
He is currently busy kicking this prefabricated excuse into overdrive by trying to claim his company was so large he could not possibly have known about the cooked books, creative accounting and artificially inflated stocks in spite of the fact that any CEO worth his salt knows what his business is up to.
A recent Newsweek article reported that the great fear among lawmakers, economic analysts and other decent folk is that what is happening now with Enron may not be one isolated instance but the way business is often conducted.
We may be so deeply mired in corruption not even a monster truck 4 x 4 with space shuttle jets could unstick us.
Our society frowns on crime. From our early days of rounding up and brutally killing people we were pretty sure might have done something wrong to our modern system of scientifically-backed jurisprudence, we have strived to root out wrong-doing and bad people.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Right now, thousands of Enron employees who worked for years in good faith for a company that was a house of cards designed with great deliberation to bilk millions from an unsuspecting country, buy politicians of all stripes and subvert energy policy for decades are out of luck while their former bosses line up to plead the fifth to avoid cushy white-collar punishments at resort style prisons.
How many good people will suffer? How many of them will be thrust into poverty?
We need to treat these white-collar criminals with same brutality and harshness we treat thieves, murderers and rapists because law and order is far too lenient with these fancy pants.
-Greg Jerrett is a Nonpareil staff writer. He can be contacted at 328-1811 ext. 279 or by e-mail at gjerrett@nonpareilonline.com.