The United States of Enron, Part II
The United States of Enron, Part II
Where is all this money coming from?
[Below is Part II of a series on The United States of Enron; you can read Part I *here*]
Is The United States of Enron Overpriced?
In March 2001, Bethany McLean published a controversial article in Fortune Magazine raising the serious question that few people were willing to ask publicly: is Enron overpriced? At the time, Enron was still the darling of Wall Street, and McLean’s article was initially met with skepticism and even hostility; but her essay demanded an accounting that the company's executives were ultimately unable to provide: where was Enron's money coming from?
McLean turned out to be correct. Enron was overpriced, and their “earnings” came from massive criminal fraud. Fortune is now understandably proud to have published McLean's prescient and groundbreaking piece.
I doubt the editors of Fortune are as proud of previous stories they ran about Enron, in which they celebrated the genius and foresight of its leaders. For example, in December 2000, just three months before they ran McLean’s article, Fortune had ranked Enron 22nd on its annual list of the 100 best companies to work for. Each year from 1996 to 2001, Fortune had named Enron as the most innovative company in America. In August 2000, Fortune hailed Enron as one of ten stocks that long-term investors should own, because it would definitely last the decade. You can view a laundry list of awards that Enron received, many of them from Fortune Magazine, at this link: https://enroncorp.com/corp/pressroom/awards/corporate.html. It is really quite a remarkable set of commendations and endorsements, given how quickly and completely Enron collapsed such a short time later.
I’m not going to pretend to have been one of the wise and discerning few who saw through the smoke and mirrors and recognized Enron for what it was: one of history’s biggest confidence games, which had successfully taken in many of the world’s (supposedly) smartest and most sophisticated investors. At that point in my life, I did not follow the news from Wall Street and had never heard of Enron until it became a household name in the aftermath of its bankruptcy.
I similarly had never heard of subprime mortgages or mortgage-backed securities prior to the 2008 financial crisis, yet I do recall a conversation in the mid-2000s where my friends and I expressed an intuitive sense that something was off. Back then, none of us were property owners or connected in any way to real estate or banking, so we had no idea if there was indeed a scam, what such a scam would look like in practice, or how it might come undone. We were simply mystified by how many new McMansions were suddenly being built all over our metro area, which was definitely not one of America’s boom towns, despite all the new construction. I recall one specific moment where we were driving down a highway that had been an old country road with literal farms just a few years earlier, but which had become a bustling thoroughfare lined with massive subdivisions full of palatial homes, and one of my friends wondered aloud (as Bethany McLean had wondered aloud about Enron a few years earlier), “Where is all this money coming from?”
It was a genuine mystery. All we knew was that none of us were seeing any of it. But somehow, there were literally thousands of households of “newly rich” families living in the vicinity of that single highway, and across the metro area, there were many more such highways being actively developed in a similarly glitzy and gaudy fashion. Where were all of the great high-paying jobs that all of these new arrivals were getting, to allow so many of them to afford such ostentatious opulence? Where were all the new and exciting industries that were creating all this new wealth, seemingly out of thin air?
Of course, as we now know, most of those gilded riches were created out of thin air. People only felt like they were rich, with no end in sight to the boom times, so they must have thought, what’s a little extra debt today, when (to borrow a line from an 80s song) the future’s so bright you gotta wear shades? After all, the conventional wisdom was that a house was a great investment, practically guaranteed to go steadily up in value, so why not jump aboard this gravy train? Yeah, past performance is no guarantee of future returns and all, but the housing market had always performed well. So people borrowed freely and spent the money lavishly. But it was all a house of cards, and when the whole thing came crashing down all at once in late 2007, it revealed yet another massive confidence game, this time vastly bigger than Enron.
Enron Was One of America’s Last Institutional Failures Where the Guilty Parties Were Actually Held Accountable
One detail that jumped out to me when I was considering Enron as an allegory for the United States and its Globohomo Empire of greed, gluttony, and decadence is this: after Enron’s collapse, the responsible parties were criminally prosecuted. How quaint and old fashioned the world was back then! Just imagine! Rich criminals put together a scam that siphoned billions of dollars out of the productive economy, resulting in financial ruin for regular people (e.g., jobs lost, pensions wiped out, etc.), and the government actually prosecuted and imprisoned the guilty parties instead of just bailing them out and turning them loose to commit another white-collar crime spree!
That didn’t happen after George Bushdemon’s administration sold us a pair of costly forever wars under false pretenses. Many of the chickenhawks in Bushdemon’s administration — Cheneydemon, Rumsfelddemon, Wolfowitzdemon, etc. — turned out to have (surprise, surprise!) big financial ties to big defense contractors. The war profiteers kept their blood money. The public paid for it. Thousands of lives were needlessly lost. Trillions of dollars were flushed down the drain. An entire region of the world was destabilized and made less safe. The murderous jihadis actually grew more powerful and deadly. The entirely needless Iraq War was an expensive disaster on so many levels. And all of it was done merely to add extra padding to the financial portfolios of centi-millionaires and billionaires. None of those responsible for the Iraq War ever faced any consequences; no lessons were learned; nothing was changed; and the next, even bigger foreign-policy disaster was made inevitable.
Accountability also didn’t happen after the 2008 financial meltdown. Quite the reverse. Although Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns went bust, most of the other large banks that should have gone bankrupt were deemed “too big to fail,” so they were bailed out. And no bankster executives were criminally prosecuted for any of it. Rather, they took their generous bailout packages and all the free money from round after round of massive Quantitative Easing (QE), and they paid themselves lavish bonuses and dividends, while foreclosing on the homes of regular rubes. This is all the more obscene because many of these banksters were the same ones who had lobbied so hard for 2005 revisions to the bankruptcy laws (which Joe Bidendemon supported) that made it more difficult for regular people to discharge their debts (including student loan debt) in bankruptcy. “Rules for thee, but not for me,” spake the banksters and their puppets in government. After the 2008 financial crisis, the ruling class’s response was simply to reinflate the bubble by printing a bunch of free money for the very banksters who had caused the crisis in the first place (something done under both the Bushdemon Administration and the Obamademon Administration — all of Barry’s “hope and change” turned out just to be for his bankster bros). None of those responsible for the financial crisis ever faced any consequences; no lessons were learned; nothing was changed; and the next, even bigger financial crisis was made inevitable.
We just lived through a massive, and massively criminal, transfer of wealth from regular people to the very rich, via our government’s response to the COVID scamdemic. Large corporations were deemed essential businesses and allowed to stay open, while small businesses were forced to close. Public health officials lied every chance they got, about every detail of the scamdemic, big and small. They lied about the origins of the virus; they lied about the risks posed by the virus itself; they lied about the effectiveness of preventative measures and treatments; they lied about the safety and efficacy of vaccines; etc., etc., etc. A criminal cartel of Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Government, Big Tech, and Big Finance all lied, cheated, and stole uncountable sums and set America on the road to financial ruin, and none — NOT A SINGLE ONE — has faced any consequences for it. Oh, and that fun “gain-of-function” research that led to the whole scamdemic in the first place? They’re still doing it, only now they’re using pathogens that are more dangerous than COVID-19. No lessons were learned; nothing was changed; and the next, even bigger public health crisis was made inevitable.
Imagine if in late 2001, rather than allowing Enron to fail, the Fed had bought all of Enron’s toxic assets for dollars on the penny and if the Bush Administration had created a massive bailout package to keep Enron’s stock from crashing. And imagine if they had done all this while allowing Enron to keep its same executives in all the same leadership roles, with no accountability whatsoever and with no oversight to make sure the company reformed its accounting practices. What would have happened next? Would Enron have become a viable company with a solid underlying business model? Or would the criminal fraud have continued on an even bigger scale than before?
For the past 20 years, we have seen increasingly large and catastrophic institutional failures caused by obviously criminal fraud. The crooks atop the failed institutions always escape accountability, and they use captured government agencies to pass their losses onto the public, even as they are allowed to keep their embezzled riches.
Meanwhile, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence. Parasitic banksters suck them dry from above, while violent criminals prey upon them from below, after being turned loose on society by George Sorosdemon’s DA’s and a politicized federal Justice Department that refuses to prosecute actual malum in se violent crimes — preferring instead to sic the criminal injustice system on the regime’s political enemies.
Self-created crisis after self-created crisis has been papered over with printed dollars and swept under the rug. For the past 20+ years, our ruling class has kept kicking the can down the road, but each time the can has grown in size, requiring more effort and expense to keep moving it into an increasingly uncertain future. Now the can is getting too big for them to move anymore. A day of reckoning is at hand.
Where Is All This Money Coming From?
I’m reminded of that question posed by my friend during the mid-2000s housing boom: “Where is all this money coming from?”
For the past few decades, our pathocratic ruling class has been running one large confidence scheme after the other, At first, the costs were periodically paid, usually by the public, but at least the books were balanced before the next scam was undertaken. Not anymore. Starting with the Global War on Terror, it seems that when each confidence scheme went bust, it just got rolled into the next one, with the scale of the grift just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Now, the entire system is insolvent and on the verge of collapse.
Our retarded ruling class has had the hubris to take on Russia and China at the same time, pushing these two world powers together.1 The USA levied punitive sanctions on the Russians (which hurt America more than it hurt the Russians), and this led to Russia and China seeking to decouple their economies from the American dollar. This movement is rapidly gaining momentum.
Saudi Arabia has been the lynchpin of America’s Petrodollar, and the Petrodollar has been the lynchpin of Globohomo American Empire (GAE — pronounced “gay”), allowing America to print all the money it needs to fund its disastrous foreign policies of forever wars and color revolutions abroad, while simultaneously conducting a Marxcissist color revolution domestically. The GAE is basically the bankster of the world, and that has given America’s leaders some incredible privileges not afforded to the leaders of other nations. Despite all the incompetence and corruption at the top of this “late-stage bureaucracy,”2 and despite all the catastrophes caused by the ever-costlier luxury beliefs the elites keep imposing on the rest of society, our pathocratic leaders have been able to fail continually upwards, because they’ve been able to print all the money they could ever need to bail themselves and their friends out of all their self-created disasters. But that’s about to change.
After publicly snubbing President Joe “Pedo” Brandondemon by refusing to take his calls,3 Saudi Arabia has jumped on the new world order being fashioned by the Chinese and Russians. Saudi Arabia is working out a deal with China to begin selling oil in Yuan.
As Malcolm Gladwell noted in his book Tipping Point, trends tend to start small and grow slowly, until a tipping point is reached, after which the trend accelerates exponentially until it goes mainstream, seemingly out of nowhere. I’m no geopolitical expert — I don’t even play one on TV — but the credentialed geopolitical experts on TV have had a pretty terrible track record when it comes to the accuracy of their predictions. They may be telling you that all is still well, but you better believe this development is, to borrow a phrase from President Trump, YUUUGE! This is the tipping point, and you will soon see a cascading avalanche of countries start dropping the dollar as the undisputed heavyweight reserve currency of the world.
The dollar is the biggest asset bubble the world has ever seen. It’s bigger than the Dutch tulip mania, the South Seas bubble, the American stock market circa mid-1929, the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, and every other historical asset bubble combined. The dollar is a piece of paper, with an intrinsic value of mere pennies, not backed by anything of any value whatsoever, that is nonetheless accorded whatever nominal value the United States of Enron wishes to assign to it, at whatever quantities the GAE’s moneychangers wish to create for themselves, and it holds its value for no reason other than the fact that everyone else in the world is willing to play along.
Those dollars have been America’s chief export, allowing us to run massive trade deficits for decades. Those dollars have paid for the military needed to maintain America’s virtual worldwide empire. Those dollars have paid for all the luxury beliefs the elites have imposed, first at home on regular Americans, and then abroad4, under the banner of the “rules-based international order” (in which GAE elite make and break whatever rules they want, without offering any pretend apologies or any believable justification for their grift). Those dollars have been propping up a clownworld regime ruled by high-status playactors who produce nothing of any real value5, yet help themselves to the first-fruits of every harvest throughout the world, and who deflect criticism from their own class by scapegoating working-class white Trump voters for their purportedly unearned privileges (being white is a privilege, not a right, don't ya know!). Those dollars have allowed psychopathic buffoons and mid-wit Marxcissists to govern like Caligula’s horse, living in unearned luxury while imposing the costs of their childish games onto everyone else. And those dollars are about to stop flowing.
Where does all this money come from? It comes from the biggest Ponzi Scheme the world has ever witnessed. And the rest of the world is about to pull the plug on their investments. And when they do, when all those countries simultaneously dump trillions of dollars onto the financial markets all at once, we will see Weimar-Germany level hyperinflation washing over America like an apocalyptic tidal wave.
The Free Money Is about to Stop Flowing
Folks, The United States of Enron is already bankrupt, just like the original Enron was when Bethany McLean wrote her article for Fortune Magazine in early 2001. Just as it happened with Enron, there will be a period of time — maybe months, maybe a few years, or maybe only a few weeks — when all seems still to be going normally . . . until one day, seemingly out of the blue (especially if you live in an echo chamber where all your news comes from CNN and MSNBC) you wake up and find the world is suddenly completely different. And that day is coming for regular Americans, just as it came for regular Enron employees: one day they showed up at the office for what they thought was a regular workday, but instead they were told to hurry and grab their personal belongings and get the hell out, because Enron was closed for business, forever. Oh, and their pension plans were worthless. And they were maybe not even going to get their final paychecks. Just as that happened to Enron’s rank-and-file employees, so too it will soon happen to regular Americans.
I’m not happy about any of this. In fact, if I’m honest, I feel a real sense of dread and sometimes even despair, when I see how bad things are. Like you, I also feel intense frustration and anger when I realize that all of this was entirely avoidable. None of this had to happen, and none of it happened naturally. None of this was the result of bottom-up, organic cultural and economic developments that we all had a hand in creating. No, this was done to us. Deliberately. With malice aforethought. By a cabal of criminal vermin who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven, even if that means sabotaging the societies over which they rule and turning them into hell on earth, just so they can stay in power.
Agenda 2030. “You will own nothing and be happy (or else)!” It’s just another way of saying, “Big Brother is watching you!” Only instead of the avuncular, mustachioed, and ruggedly handsome figure of Big Brother surveilling you, it’ll be some fat-assed, pale-skinned, pink-haired transsexual with a “The Future Is Female!” t-shirt who will be sending the secret police to pick you up for your thoughtcrimes.
And that may be the silver lining in all of this. The criminal scum atop the GAE believe they can conduct a controlled demolition of the world economy and herd humanity into the pods, where we’ll eat bugs and take our Soma and jack our brains into the metaverse until we die. They think they will be able to manage the chaos, but their ability to wield both the carrot and the stick depends on them retaining their monopoly over the money supply. And that money’s about to become worthless.
We’re in uncharted territory, in the middle of a deep ocean; our ship of state has struck the iceberg; and the water is about to come rushing in much faster than we can possibly bail it out. By the time you see it reported in the mainstream corporate media, the ship will already be on its way to the bottom of the sea. But this shipwreck may be the great equalizer that allows us to escape the fate that our psychopathic elites have planned for us, a fate that is truly worse than death.
The enemy of my enemy is, if not my friend, at least my ad hoc ally. And if you’re American, right now our own ruling class is a far greater threat than Putin or Xi. Not saying Putin and Xi are our friends, but they are enemies of our enemy. And you know what else is an enemy of our enemy? Truth. Virtue. Reason. Reality. That’s why our ruling class fights so hard against reality, with nonsense like “trans women are women” (sorry, “womxn”) and “2+2 can equal 5.” But their war against reality is incredibly costly to wage, and we come back to that question, “Where is all this money coming from?”
And then there’s God. Whatever the powers and principalities that rule our demon-infested world might be, I believe that the ultimate spiritual power (i.e., God) is very much on the side of Truth and Virtue, the very things the GAE has been actively waging war against. The GAE’s elites have made themselves enemies of God, so when those elites tell us that we’re on the “wrong side of history” for rejecting their worldview, that’s actually a pretty good side to be on. In Romans 9: 17-18 (a passage that gave John Calivin so many conniption fits), St. Paul talks about God hardening Pharaoh’s heart to make him into a foil so that God’s own glory and goodness could be revealed. When I see the sheer retardation and hubris of the GAE’s elites, working indefatigably to bring about a self-created apocalypse, I wonder, is God doing to these demons in human skin that run The United States of Enron the same thing that the Bible says he did to Pharaoh? If so, we have reason to be hopeful.6
Can America win World War III? For a sobering analysis, check out
's excellent essay: Why America Can't Win World War III - by John Carter (substack.com)A Very Short One-Act Foreign-Policy Farce:
Salman (the Crown Prince’s personal assistant): Your Highness, sala’am alaikum! President Brandon is calling from America on line one. I will transfer the call to you when you’re ready . . .
Mohammed bin Salman (Crown Prince): What? Brandon’s calling? What does that pervert want? Tell that loser I’ll call him back when I get around to it, which may be two weeks from now, or it may be never. He won’t remember anyway. Tell him to stop shitting his pants, and maybe I’ll take his calls. I cannot waste my time talking to perverted pants-poopers like Brandon or his crackhead son.
Salman: Yes, your Highness. Oh, President Xi Jinping’s press secretary’s administrative assistant, Sue, is calling on line two —
Mohammed bin Salman: Quick, gimme the phone! It’s probably something important! . . .
The substacker who goes by the name
(named after the Soviet defector who explained the communist playbook for destroying America from within) has a fun article with a lot of great memes on the Globohomo American Empire’s (GAE) method for conducting color revolutions throughout the world: (1) How To Execute a Color Revolution and Implement Regime Change (substack.com)Read the first part of The United States of Enron series here: (1) The United States of Enron, Part I - by Daniel D (substack.com)
So here's a fun little fact: one of the prosecutors in the Arthur Andersen, LLP case was none other than Andrew Weissman--of Mueller Report fame. Andersen, then one of the largest accounting/auditing firms in the world, was indicted and convicted of obstruction of justice, nominally for shredding documents. Well, here's the thing: that conviction was reversed by a unanimous Supreme Court, which held that a defendant cannot be convicted of obstruction of justice without some conscious awareness of wrongdoing connected to a particular proceeding. Turns out the documents in question may well have been shredded in keeping with Anderson's blanket document retention policies. But Weissman and the rest of the prosecutorial team convinced the trial judge to modify the jury instructions such that the jury could convict without any need for corrupt motive.
This became a hallmark of prosecutorial overreach. Precisely the sort of overreach that would mark the rest of Weissman's career at DoJ. . . .
It's no fun being a Cassandra. I've been writing about this since 2010 at least, though I quit for awhile because hardly anyone cared. It is rather gratifying in a way that learning how to build a house, grow more food than I can eat, ferment alcohol, play music etc skills might actually carry some weight soon, even as I am well aware of the ramifications more than most, and it grieves my heart.
Good news is, the woke/trans/critical race crowd will be utterly helpless without their GAE backstop, and a lot of those -demons are likely to meet a grisly turn to meet their maker.