"Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation." — Clarence Darrow

Will Enron get away with it? Will the people not be able to see the forest for the trees? The corporation for the criminals? In Enron Outrage Championed, Lukas Velush writes about how former Snohomish County PUD commissioner Roger Rice is baffled that there isn't more outrage about Enron's latest attempt to steal from the people:

Rice wonders why Snohomish County residents who may be forced to pay Enron $122 million aren't more angry despite proof that the PUD's contract with the bankrupt energy trader was illegal.

I'm still pissed off. Part of the problem in punishing Enron is that Enron is not a person--but corporations have all the rights of people. When it comes time to hold the corporate person entity accountable, it dissolves into a bloody mess. In chapter two, "Banding Together for the Common Good: Corporations, Government, and 'The Commons,'" of the book Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, Thom Hartmann writes the following:

The stage is now set. We have looked at the nature of the problem--activities conducted by a small number of parties that are harmful to many. These activities are often a natural consequence of the way corporations are chartered--to make a profit. We have looked at the nature of government, particularly governments designed to serve the people, including managing the commons--the shared resources used by everyone in the community.

We have said that when the people within a company make a decision that harms the common welfare, they are often not held accountable for their actions because they claim "it was the corporation that did it." Yet we have also seen that these same parties have claimed, and won, constitutional protections for the legal fiction that we call corporations, protections that were originally designed to protect people from the dangers of despotic governments. (42)

Consider the following Enron news items:

Enron Gouged Western Customers for at Least $1.1 billion, Public Utility Says
Enron Tapes Expose Blatant Criminality of Corporate America
Britons Fight Extradition on Enron Fraud
Prosecutors Seeking Lay Indictment

These stories keep on coming, the actions taken against Enron keep getting spread out, and little is being accomplished. And Enron is still committing its crimes of bilking the people, raiding the commons. What we need to do is put Simon Wiesenthal on the case. But even he would take years to get the culprits. Maybe instead of focusing so much on catching these particular bastards, we should fix the system and end corporate personhood. Forget the symptom and deal with the cause.

But the people aren't aware of the problems with the system. The corporate media won't inform them. Rather, we get the highlighted corporate criminal of the day who slithers away moments later into the abyss of the corporatocracy. Forget about this evil Enron or that evil Nike or this evil Exxon, and focus on the evil corporation overall (they are all criminals). The concept of corporations is evil. Corporations are the evil empire in Star Wars; they are The Matrix; they are virus that makes us ill. See the Corporate Crime Reporter and also Corporate Predators and also Corpwatch and also Corporate Governance (which seeks to make corporations more accountable, but seems to support the idea of corporations in general) and also Corporations Suck and also Ending Corporate Governance: Revoking Our Plutocracy and also Essential Information (Ralph Nader's site that is connected with the publication Multinational Monitor) and also In Fact and also No Logo and also Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD, which, on its home page, states the same thing I just said about focusing on the concept of corporations instead of individual corporate criminals) and also They Rule and also Endgame and also When Corporations Rule the World. Yes, Enron Owns the GOP. Corporations own the GOP. They own the Democrats, too. They own everything but your mind--so long as you don't let them.