Enron

(To bypass the introductory quotations, scroll down five "screens" to "Enron and End Time.")

"Americans are fucked. They've been bought off. And they come real cheap: a few million dirt bikes, camcorders, microwaves, cordless phones, digital watches, answering machines, jet skis and sneakers with lights in 'em. You say you want a few items back from the Bill of Rights? Just promise the doofuses new gizmos." George Carlin

"They debated the NAFTA trade bill for a long time: should we sign it or not? Either way the people get fucked. Trade always exists for the traders. Any time you hear businessmen debating 'which policy is better for Americans' don't bend over." George Carlin

"The grimmest shock of all, for me, was doing the math and comprehending that a player the size of Enron purchases the machinery of our democracy out of petty cash. Out of pocket change. Enron executives, who cashed in $1.1 billion in stock while their company was failing, who stood to gain $254 million in tax rebates from the president's economic stimulus bill alone, purchased the affections of George W. Bush for a measly million - like a buck for the hat-check girl. They acquired their entire stable of elected officials for $5.8 million in campaign contributions. That shrewd investment was the best one Enron ever made.

If it doesn't make you furious, nothing ever will. This gross difference in scale, between "big money" to a politician and "big money" to a Kenneth Lay, is the reason we have to build a firewall between electoral politics and corporate treasure. It's as if Fort Knox - symbolically the wealth of this nation, our wealth - were guarded only by mangy dogs, and you could carry off the gold by tossing them a few scraps of meat. Yet, here's a depressing footnote: One reporter's interviews with MBA students at Columbia, in the wake of the Enron disaster, revealed not a trace of righteous indignation.

Their main, if not their only concern, was Enron's effect on the job market. It's unlucky that America, wearing its favorite masks of wounded innocence and belligerent patriotism, is not currently in the mood for self-examination. Today many Americans cling to the myth of benevolent, self-regulating "free markets"as ardently as they embrace free speech or trial by jury. Yet all our experience, every page of our history, tells us that capitalists without cops devolve into bullies and thieves, even monsters. Enron didn't lock its employees in concentration camps without toilets or floorboards, like the coal barons of Dante, Virginia, but it's clear that Enron would have done so, if it had been profitable and common practice among its peers. Enron management only stole its employees' life savings and replaced them with worthless stock, then fired people who complained about it on Internet message boards.

One specialist in corporate communications, sick of the hypocrisy of company "credos" offered Enron's epitaph: "Why not just come right out and say it? "We will strive to make as much money as we can without going to prison."

"The real scandal here may not be what's illegal, but what's permissible." Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, during the Governmental Affairs Committee's investigation into the Enron bankruptcy.

"Here's the bottom line: the little guy in America gets the shaft and the people at the top seem to get the elevator and a big ride They should be handcuffed to a chain-link fence, flogged and jailed."

Ohio Rep. James Traficant, on the Enron bankruptcy scandal.

"Enron's corporate culture was brutally Darwinian. 'It was really a vicious cutthroat place to work,' says an insider."

We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us. John Kenneth Galbraith

It seems to me there are very dangerous ambiguities about our democracy in its actual present condition. I wonder to what extent our ideals are now a front for organized selfishness and irresponsibility. If our affluent society ever breaks down and the façade is taken away, what are we going to have left? Thomas Merton

"It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it, induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to do it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as here assumed... Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.... Inasmuch as most good things are produced by labor, it follows that all such things ought to belong to those whose labor has produced them. But it has happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others, without labor, have enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor as nearly as possible is a worthy object of any good government." Abraham Lincoln

"It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can only be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naive conception of this world as a testing ground to a more mature view of the universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making this shift is essentially religious, not political or economic." Vine DeLoria Jr.

"I'll help you fix and squeeze yourself up a new kind of God, one that tells you fertilize and multiply, outsow, and outblow, outplant and outgrow, outdo and outrun." Woody Guthrie

"You are fed up with words and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make meaning be there again by magic..."

'If conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy "the needs" it instils in society's members.' Ivan Illich paraphrase

"The only escape from this destiny of victimization has been to 'succeed,' that is, to 'make it' into the class of exploiters, and then to remain so specialized and so 'mobile' as to be unconscious of the effects of one's life or livelihood." Wendell Berry

"We are convinced that theories do not matter... Never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, anyone can discuss it... Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist... now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian. But there are some people nevertheless - and I am one of them - who think that the most important thing about man is still his view of the universe... We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them." G. K. Chesterton

"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held... But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another, slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"... Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally opposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision no Big Brother is required... As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared is those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one... Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with the equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy... In 1984, Huxley added people who are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. Neil Postman, "Amusing Ourselves to Death," 1985

"The problem is not politics but a bad way of life." Wendell Berry

"The people of the West refused to make the distinction between gluttony and the good life." E. F. Schumacher

"Always distinguish between need and want." William Wellington Archibald and Mildred Mary Noll Archibald

More than you need is never enough. Alan Archibald

"It was wants that made man poor." E. F. Schumacher

"The wealthy have made of poverty a vice." Plato

"My greatest skill has been to want but little." Thoreau

"Money is the thief of man." Hindu saying

Give me neither poverty nor wealth. Provide me with the food I need. If I have too much, I shall deny thee and say "Who is Lord?" Proverbs 30:8-9

"It is a strange thing to see with what sort of feverish ardor Americans pursue well-being and how they show themselves constantly tormented by a vague fear of not having chosen the shortest route that can lead to it... In addition to the goods that (the American) possesses ... he imagines a thousand others that death will prevent him from enjoying if he does not hasten." Alexis de Tocqueville

"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage."

"Shopping and buying - and getting and having - comprise the Great American Addiction. No one is immune. When the underclass riots in this country, they don't kill policemen and politicians, they steal merchandise. How embarrassing."

"The greater the wealth, the thicker the dirt. This indubitably describes a tendency of our time." J. K. Galbraith

There's an observable relationship between "the filthy rich" and "the squeaky clean." Alan Archibald

An immaculate house is the sure sign of a misspent life. Janet Archibald's refrigerator magnet

"His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean." Bob Dylan

"The truth is we are all caught in an economic system which is heartless." Woodrow Wilson

"Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite." J. K. Galbraith

"We do the illegal immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." Henry Kissinger

"I want to consider society, the society we may expect to have after this war. We may expect a society that is highly centralized. It may be organised for peace: we hope it will. It may have to be organised against future wars, and if so, so much the worse. But in either case it will be very tightly knit; it will be planned; and it will be bureaucratic. Bureaucracy, in a technical age like ours, is inevitable. The advance of science means the growth of bureaucracy and the reign of the expert. And as a result, society and the state will be the same thing.

This has never happened in the past. Society used to be much more diffuse. The government was there, making laws and wars but it could not interfere so much with the individual: it had not the means. When I was a boy there was no wireless, no motor-cars: at an earlier date there were no telegrams, no railways: eearlier still, no posts. You cannot interfere with people unless you can communicate with them easily. Society was diffuse, and in the midst of the diffusion the artist flourished. If he was a painter he painted for the king and courtiers, who probably had some individual ideas about painting, or for the the great aristocrats, or for the local squire, or for the church He lived in a society which was broken up into groups and he had the chance of picking the group which suited him. That society, after lasting for thousands of years, has suddenly hardened and become centralized, and in the future the only effective patron will be the state."

E.M. Forster, "Two Cheers for Democracy," 1942

"It should be pointed out that if we tried to build education on the single pattern of "the scientific idea of man" and carry it out accordingly, we could only do so by distorting or warping this idea: for we should have to ask what is the nature and destiny of man, and we should be pressing the only idea at our disposal, that is the scientific one, for an answer to our question. Then we would try, contrary to its type, to draw from it a kind of metaphysics. From the logical point of view, we would have a spurious metaphysics disguised as science and yet deprived of any really philosophical insight; and from the practical point of view, we would have a denial or misconception of those very realities and values without which education loses all human sense or becomes the training of an animal for the utility of the state." Jacques Maritain

"What are nations without justice but large bands of thieves?" Pope John XXIII

I once calculated Lee Iacocca's hourly recompense - including a panoply of perks - and it rounded off to $10,000.00 an hour. (Currently, many Chief Executive Officers "take in" $40,000.00 per hour.)

No one earns $10,000.00 per hour.

$10,000.00 per hour can only be stolen.

Similarly, Dick Cheney's 38 million severance pay from Halliburton (oil company) is straight-up thievery, no matter how the American legal system covers his ass with paper legitimization.

In a culture where greed, avarice, envy and unbridled ambition have been transformed from spiritual calamities into civic virtues, it is very difficult - regardless one's formal religious affiliation - not to worship the "Golden Calf."

We chuckle at the thought. Golden Calf? Come now.

We are - all of us - doing our jobs, and doing them well.

In one way or another we all pimp for a System that has "privatized" evil, enabling our individual consciences to remain remarkably untroubled.

Recently, Pope John Paul II has focused attention on the impropriety of "good Catholics" "just doing their jobs" whenever their work undermines the Kingdom of God. Specifically, the pope enjoins Catholic lawyers to stop advocating divorce. He doesn't ask about accountants - even the "good ones" at Arthur Anderson - who propagate book-keeping methods that are dishonest and obfuscatory. What about business people who sell products by fostering fear, greed, envy and lust?

What about stock-brokers and market makers who hype companies with the earmarks of fly-by-night New Guinea gold mines? What about our culturally-engrained attitude that boundless economic growth is a good - even necessary - trait, although there are few who doubt the biosphere's collision course with unsustainability? (Kenneth L. Woodward, Newsweek's Jesuit-trained Religion editor, says "Catholicism is a communitarian way of life." Woodward's assessment is accurate. Sadly, Catholics have not awakened to the mortal implications of America's "pay-as-you-go" individualism.)

What is the appropriate economic role for each of us who advocate justice, if, as Woodrow Wilson put it: "We are all caught in an economic system which is heartless." Since the marketplace is, increasingly, a Darwinian black hole, our moral responsibility is to resist, to criticize, even to quit. The Church has dropped "the prophetic ball" by not asking hard questions.Outside the Church, there's not even the pretense of prophecy, just the unrelenting crush of materialist immediacy.

Here's a revealing anecdote from my student teaching days at Berkeley High School.

It was 1987. I was teaching AP biology. My students were primarily children of Berkeley professors and Berkeley radicals. The lowest IQ in the class was 135. One day, I asked whether we might consider a ceiling on the money any individual could earn in a year. All earnings above this putative amount would fund a national health plan.

Not one student accepted the notion of an earnings cap no matter where we put it - $10,000,000.00, $100,000,000.00, $100,000,000,000.00. (Which reminds me... Recently, while idling at Kroger's checkout, I read that Katie Couric the morning talk show host - just sealed a deal for 62.5 million dollars a year. Is Katie Couric worth the Gross National Product of many countries? Fortunately, we're blameless; not the slightest hint of collusion as we smile at Katie over morning coffee.)

A pervasive delusion cultivated by "the information economy" is that "adequate information dispersal" will be our salvation. Just get enough info out there, and everyone will behave virtuously.

I recall my Liverpudlian friend John who drank himself to death. Once, while drying out on a medical ward, John befriended a diabetic woman who'd already lost both legs. She smoked like a chimney.

Information routinely bewilders people with a welter of "particulars." The ruling classes are keenly aware that the simplest smoke screens are created by a torrent of information. "Data smog" is an apt phrase.

Our misplaced faith in information would be better invested in "principles" of wisdom.

"It is characteristic that Einstein and Planck had the greatest admiration for Kant's work, agreeing with his view that philosophy should be the basis of all sciences." Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, "Reality and Scientific Truth"

How quaint. How unscientific.

"Scientific 'facts' are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious 'facts' were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner ... science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight." Paul Feyerabend, "How To Defend Society Against Science"

".... Information has become a form of garbage, and ourselves garbage collectors.... Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we are awash with information without even a broom to help us get rid of it. Information comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular.... And there is no loom to weave it all into fabric. No transcendent narratives to provide us with moral guidance, social purpose, intellectual economy. No stories to tell us what we need to know and what we do not need to know." Neil Postman

Folks with little academic training are not especially attracted to "the facts." They prefer the appeal of principle.

As a fundamental principle, I propose John XXIII's observation - "What are nations without justice but large bands of thieves?"

It is not extremist to categorize "the rich and powerful" as thieves. It is a level-headed appraisal of their essential role in American life.

"It is true that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly improbable, not many do; and the art of growing rich is not only quite distinct form that of doing good, but the practice of the one does not at all train a man for practicing the other... It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything else...on thirty thousand as on two thousand a year." Robert Louis Stevenson

"The need for financial security was too deeply engrained. That singular fear is probably the greatest obstacle to moral action in today's society. There are arguments that one can live simply on a large salary while using the excess for good works, but we have never seen them lived out." Janet and Rob Aldridge who quit Lockheed after 25 years. Prior to his resignation, Aldridge was in charge of designing the Maneuvering Re-entry Vehicle (MARV) for the Trident missile.

"I tell you this woman's two cents is worth more than the donations of all the others together." Y'eshua of Nazareth

In the early 19th century, American corporations operated at the "re-newable leisure" of municipalities. If citizens determined that a corporation wasn't working for the common good, the company's charter was cancelled. In the early days of big business, enough people controlled individual means of production to insure that cancellation of a corporate charter would not devastate the local economy.

Such widely distributed productive capacity guaranteed community control of corporations until community chartering was dismantled by 19th century "robber barons" who introduced monopolies and "trusts." Simultaneously, the corporate juggernaut persuaded a majority of urbanites to relinquish individual control of production in order to dedicate their lives to The Machine. Compulsory Government Schooling (instituted at Barnstable, Massachusetts in 1847 over the resistance

of armed parents) insured docile, obedient graduates eager to work the will of nascent industrialism. Teddy Roosevelt tried to bridle these corporate monoliths, but "the die was cast." As goslings imprint upon their mother, contemporary Americans bear the imprint of corporate entities at whose altars we reflexively worship.

It is the great tragedy of the 20th century that the foundation of populism collapsed, and that "the populace" could no longer be trusted to vote in its own best interest. The primacy of corporate manufacture has become so powerful that it overwhelms us all. The prospect of collective control over corporate power has become un-Amercan, even traitorous.

In effect, we all encourage large organizations (including large non-profit - and religious - organizations) to sequester disproportionate resource so they may advance the factory model of "universal well-being."

Traditional peoples have always considered such resource sequestration as theft. Sadly, conscience is an increasingly rare commodity, partly because the behavior of global corporations is beyond the understanding of common folk, and, in some ways, beyond the ken of corporations themselves.

When CEOs and corporate boards in New York, Chicago and L.A. authorize "the development of a new oil field on Amazonian tribal land," they're largely unaware of the destruction they provoke. These people really believe in "progress" and its "trickle down" benefit for deprived natives. They pacify misgivings with the unquestioning (and unquestionable) assumption that displaced people are better off when integrated into modernity. Whether this integration occurs by being

lucky enough to get an "oil field" job, or by being displaced to open-sewer shanty towns, makes little difference to the March of Progress.

In the main, we have been conditioned to gawk at mere magnitude. We suck on the teats of the biggest sows, and then express "three news-cycle outrage" when at increasingly frequent intervals "mommy eats her young."

There's no denying that large organizations accomplish marvels. Sadly, the Monolith of Productivity has engendered the belief that large organizations will "take care of us."

Big schools, big government, big business.

Public instruction bears disproportionate responsibility for teaching us to worship bigness. The nation's schools comprise America's largest "corporate program" dwarfing the nation's military. It is a full-blown tragedy that these government franchise schools do not teach children to create their own "unique work in the world" as most human beings - artisans and peasants - have done for a hundred thousand years. Instead, students are trained to genuflect sheepishly at the altar of JOBS, "government funding" and "programs." It doesn't occur to us to question our abject idolization of dominant bigness and the radical dependence such bigness engenders.

Interestingly, ninety percent of all new jobs are created by businesses with fewer than 50 employees. Why, then, does political favoritism rest with marketplace behemoths (the organizations most prone to "cutbacks" and "streamlining") rather than the little guys who actually create employment?

University graduates also bear disproportionate responsibility for the adulation of bigness since sheepskin functionaries benefit most by acquiescent service to The Machine.

Clearly, capital-intensive industry moves the world.

Sadly, we don't ask whether the world is simultaneously moved out of orbit.

The Machine ensures that searching questions dare I say moral questions are never asked.

At the outset of the Clinton administration, Democrats and Republicans embraced "managed care" with messianic fervor. A decade later, "managed care" is recognized as the worst debacle in American health history.

Why did "our" "public" "discussion" of "managed" "care" never explore the possibility that non-profit status be a pre-requisite for HMO chartering?

Kaiser-Permanente, the nation's first health maintenance organization - and still the nation's best - is a non-profit corporation. Despite Kaiser's extraordinarily successful model, "talking heads" and government mugwumps never advocated the evident wisdom of building on K-P's success.

Unless abject spiritual bereftness is taken into account, how can we think to profit from people's disease? The notion is as bizarre as the whole System we've put in place.

As Wendell Berry says, the fundamental problem "is not politics but a bad way of life."

Wisdom requires the primacy of principle.

Profit wallows in a welter of disconnected info-bits floating in a philosophically bottomless void. The shills of Profit make simplistic appeal to the shrewdness of Leviathan and the miraculous ministrations of "the inivisible hand."

The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace is entropy jerking itself off.

This cathectic puerility releases tremendous energy. It also provides anonymity, exemption from personal responsibility, and exquisite frisson.

Tragically, this unprecedented release of orgasmic power does nothing to foster human relationship.

Re-newed worship of the "Golden Calf" subjects us to the Tyranny of Now, to the smothering matrix of mere materialism, to the pressing urgency of the hyperkinetic moment, to a whirlwind of contradictory "obligations."

Caught in the maelstrom, there's neither time nor energy to develop a long-term, principled view. Absent principle, we're constantly twitched by the riotous stimuli that assail our senses.

Conditioned to consume from an ever-expanding menu of manufactured consolation prizes, Americans are desparate to believe that Enron - an erstwhile ikon of corporate progressivism - is "an exception."

Corporate America - cut-throat by any measure - performs philanthropy to purchase Concubine Suites on Pennsylvania Avenue and other brothels of power. It's not really philanthropy. It's "the cost of doing business" a carefully calculated bribe that absolves moneyed interests from substantive responsibility. Jesus contextualized philanthropy by admiring the poor widow: "I tell you this woman's two cents is worth more than the donations of all the others together." Church and

State are quick to represent the Nazarene's comment as hyperbole: in fact, what's needed is your two cents. "Every citizen's primary responsibility is to keep his mouth open."

I used to hold a simple view of corporate malfeasance: the bad guys were magnates who exploited the people. In the not distant past, it may have been this simple. "Did you notice that a couple of years ago, everything changed?" (George Carlin)

We've been "dumbed down" by mass media, mass "education" and celebrity culture.

We're all anxious to mount the Golden Calf.

Sure, we support pet causes and favorite charities. But when push comes to shove, our bedrock belief resides in "The Lottery." From health care to the stock market, modern America is a numbers game. We drool in hope our number "comes up."

Although Ken Lay's enactment of the pyramid scheme - and his meretricious philanthropy - are now revealed with startling transparency, Enron stands cheek-by-jowl with all corporate activity predicated on unsustainable growth.

Eventually, someone's left "holding the bag."

For the time-being, the "genius" of modern capitalism (at least as practiced in the northern latitudes) has been to replace the Dickinsian exploitation of human beings with the erosion of human spirit, and unabashed exploitation of the environment.

There will be a reckoning.

Yin and yang are intextricably intertwined and can only be bent slightly out of shape before rebounding with vengeance.

Whether the Arctic ozone rent drifts south to settle over central Europe, or we experience catastrophic interruption in oceanic food chains, or melting ice caps cause unpredictable havoc in global ecosystems, something is brewing.

When fermentation is complete, environmental degradation will suddenly be seen as personal degradation.

In the end, humanity will be left holding the bag.

Tragically, "bread and circuses" have had such coarsening effect on the populace that most "consumer units" no longer have eyes to see nor ears to hear. Nevertheless, a direct chain of causality flows from compulsive corporate productivity to eco-anthropic catastrophe.

"The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves." G. K. Chesterton, Toronto, 1930

The current trajectory will not end well.

In 5 years -- or 50 or 500 humankind will experience an unendurable environmental disaster. This pending debacle is directly attributable to the philosophy of unbounded "growth" that undergirds cowboy capitalism and its globalizing offspring.

When the hens come home to roost, large American corporations will be seen as the marauders they are proponents of consumption, greed, arrogance, envy, covetousness, fear, fatuity and lust whose cumulative upshot is the systematic dismantling of meaning, soulfulness and conviviality.

Insofar as Enron focused on "energy" trading -- without any real development or production -- it may have been marginally more prone to "pulling a fast one" than monolithic producers like Exxon, Microsoft and U.S. Steel. Still, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

There are no panaceas, no magic bullets, no miracle cures. It may even be that some sort of "apocalypse" is hard-wired into the human condition.

The Buddha's First Noble Truth endures: "Life is Suffering."

Nevertheless, real progress is possible if we cling to small scale and the primacy of interpersonal relationship. Politically, do everything possible to decentralize power, starting with the political power that clusters around corporate capital.

At minimum, the Enron "scandal" (or, what we might more accurately call "Business as Usual") begs election finance reform that would prevent any individual or "interest" from making simultaneous donation to more than one political party in a given political contest.

For better or worse, we have a winner-take-all two-party system.

To support both parties simultaneously (in a given contest) is not participation in American politics. It is treasonous subversion - boldfaced determination to "buy protection" as gangsters have always done. As individuals, we don't play "both sides of the fence," yet we subscribe to the plutocratic programming that champions corporate two-facedness as the linchpin of democratic vigor.

I don't know if Taliban sympathizer John Walker Lindh is a traitor.

I am certain that corporate cynics who "buy protection" are.

So are those who let themselves be bought.

If citizens are obliged to define their political positions by choosing one party over others, the body politic would strengthen immediately.Imposing this limitation would fortify the body politic even if nothing is done to restrain the total amount of money awash in The System. Single party support (on a given issue, or in a given electoral contest) would insure that elected representatives (and political parties) be more responsive to their partisans, and not to the traitorous thieves who

purchase protection to operate "under the radar" of collective oversight.

We need to disenfranchise corporations. The Constitution does not invest corporations with suffrage. Nor should they be allowed to influence those who do vote. Similarly, corporations are not citizens and therefore are not guaranteed freedom of speech.Nor is a corporate spokesperson actiing as a citizen, but as a servo-mechanism for an autonomous, non-human agent.

To limit suffrage to citizens only, let us teach our young that anyone supporting both parties on a given issue -- or in a given electoral contest -- is a traitor. If possible, legislate two-faced support as treason.

While reforming our acculturative mechanisms, let us also teach that Ken Lay, Dick Cheney and Lee Iacocca are anthropo-biospheric thugs. To thrive - even to survive - we need to define them as such. However, attacking Enron as an "isolated instance" recalls "the distration of human sacrifice." We imagine that a single scapegoat will placate the gods, when in fact, the situation will worsen 'til all the bastards are "burned at the stake."

It would also be tonic if we beat our own breasts, acknowledging the collusion that has made such criminality possible.

That's what we should do What will actually happen?

Enron will suffer the death of a thousand cuts. The government and press - performing their co-dependent two-step - will focus on minutiae until, at last, we arrive at that "consummation devoutly to be wished." We will lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Then, exhausted, we will sleep again.

Footnote: Here's the template for "legitimate thievery."

When Europeans laid claim to the New World, they spread a "grid of legality" over two continents, claiming to fill a legal void left by indigenous peoples. According to the European claim, the absence of "paperwork" demonstrated that no one "owned" the land.

Since native tribes lacked "paperwork" to prove "ownership," European colonizers declared themselves owners of the hemisphere, establishing a "meta-level" proprietary claim based on the putative superiority of paper documentation that pre-empted social, political and economic arrangements already in place. By virtue of this "end run," colonizers disenfranchised a hundred million "savages" who'd occupied the "New" World for 10,000 years.

Today, this same process of unstoppable expropriation is perpetuated by oil companies, timber firms, and other resource, manufacturing and media giants. Under the same aegis, "the big boys (and girls)" "authorize" seizure of resource whenever peremptory seizure benefits The Machine or The Machine's operatives. (It is acknowledged that occasional nominal payments are made, much like the baubles that "purchased" Manhattan.)

Lawyers and politicians "paper over" these seizures, and, except for transient protest by backwater inhabitants (who are quickly "re-located" to open-sewer slums,) The Machine expands its sovereignty.

The impasse contained in the scientific viewpoint itself can only be broken through by the attainment of a view of nothingness which goes further than, which transcends the nihil of nihilism. The basic Buddhist insight of Sunyata, usually translated as "emptiness," "the void," or "no-Thingness," that transcends this nihil, offers a viewpoint that has no equivalent in Western thought.

The consciousness of the scientist, in his mechanized, dead and dumb universe, logically reaches the point where -- if he practices his science existentially and not merely intellectually -- the meaning of his own existence becomes an absurdity and he stands on the rim of the abyss of nihil face to face with his own nothingness. People are not aware of this dilemma. That it does not cause great concern is in itself a symptom of the sub-marine earthquake of which our most desperate world-problems are merely symptomatic.

... It is becoming ever clearer that the terrors of war, hunger and despoliation are neither economic, nor technolgical problems for which there are economic or technological solutions. They are primarily spiritual problems..."

Frederick Franck was born into a non-observant Jewish family in Holland. He was subsequently baptized a Protestant. After graduating as a dentist, Franck began the first dental clinic at Albert Schweitzer's hospital in West Africa. Later, having embarked a career as writer and artist, Mr. Franck heeded Pope John XXIII's call to build a society of peace on earth (Pacem in Terris). Franck became the official artist of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and, as a tribute to Pope John, has created a temple of all faiths called Pacem in

Terris on his property in Warwick, New York.