Volume
53, Number 9 | February 2002
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Volume
53, Number 9 | February 2002 |
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The meltdown of Enron, the giant energy trading firm, which recently ranked as the seventh largest U.S. corporation—now its largest ever bankruptcy—is one of the most startling events in U.S. financial history. Only a few months ago Enron was the toast of Wall Street. It was the symbol of the New Economy and of the deregulation of both finance and energy markets. Its former CEO, Jeffrey K. Skilling, promoted the idea that assets were not what made a company valuable. Instead what counted was a corporation’s intellectual capital. He sold the idea of Enron as a nimble, highly-leveraged, “asset-light” company engaged in aggressive internet-based trading. The point is that this huge and highly regarded corporation did not make anything. Nor did it perform a service like distributing energy. It was in essence a purely speculative enterprise, making money through trading made possible by the deregulation of a basic consumer need (electricity). And U.S. business bought it! For six years in a row, the editors of Fortune magazine selected Enron as the “most innovative” among the magazine’s “most admired” corporations. Enron was a principal fundraising source for President George W. Bush’s electoral campaign. It was a big winner in California’s electrical deregulation crisis, which generated skyrocketing electricity prices and huge profits for big energy traders. Enron’s corporate empire was underwritten by some of the biggest U.S. banks, including J. P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup. | more | REVIEW
OF THE MONTH The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation was established last year for the purpose of building on the late journalist and author’s agenda for a socialist future. To that end, the foundation launched an annual essay contest. We’re pleased to publish the contest’s inaugural prize-winning essay, chosen by an international jury from entries representing ten states and five countries. Submissions for the 2002 prize of $2500 should be no longer than 5000 words in any language and should be sent to the Foundation at P.O. Box 334, Sherman CT, 06784, U.S.A. Professor Sam Gindin is the Packer chair in Social Justice, Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto.—The Editors New Crusade: The
U.S. War The world changed on September 11. That’s not just media hype. The way some historians refer to 1914–1991 as the “short twentieth century,” many are now calling September 11, 2001, the real beginning of the twenty-first century. It’s too early to know whether that assessment will be borne out, but it cannot simply be dismissed. Japan’s
Stagnationist Crises The severe economic stagnation in Japan over the 1990s and into the present decade, is one of the most portentous developments in the recent history of world capitalism. In this article, Joseph Halevi and Bill Lucarelli account for the Japanese stagnation in terms inspired by the work of Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff. MR readers will find this article, which deals with the complicated issue of exchange rate fluctuations and their effect on national economies, more difficult than most articles that we publish on economics in the magazine. Yet we include it here because of its obvious importance and its clarity in describing a very complex set of global economic changes.—the Editors Renewing Socialism Does it make any sense to speak in terms of socialist renewal at the beginning of the twenty-first century? The massive anti-capitalist protests from Seattle to Prague to Quebec that captured the world's attention at the beginning of the new millennium attest to the fact that the spirit of revolution, one of the central facets of political life over the previous centuries, is hardly a thing of the past. BOOK
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