Washington -- What does it tell you about Hollywood that already
before the courts have decided Enron's fate and before
congressional inquiries have made any headway in identifying the
culprits Hollywood's resident producers and directors know the plot
line? A dozen or so studios in La-La Land are rushing Big Screen
and TV Screen melodramas to their audiences about the Enron
debacle. Soon the credulous audiences, so addicted to seeing
soldiers doing battle in slow motion and heroes explode with body
parts everywhere, are going to watch three-piece suits connive and
cook the books with stentorian pronouncements of two minutes
duration -- about all the time Hollywood allows for dialogue before
another visual effect explodes across the screen.
Hollywood will roll out its "real-life" Enron dramas despite the
fact that no one yet knows what precisely the Enron story was or
who the culprits might be. The skullduggery was vast but surely so
complicated that it will take some doing to know its arcane plot.
The victims are pretty much known but the exact identities of the
occasional heroes remain obscure. The self-serving "whistle
blowers" have yet to have their schemes or veracity established.
Yet Hollywood is proceeding with its "Enron Story."
Is this not like rushing out a TV drama of the Lewinsky scandal
a month after President Bill Clinton's inamorata was identified and
still insisting that she knew not the big lug's passionate
side?
Of course, Hollywoodians know all about corporate hustlers,
cut-throat deal makers, and accounting frauds. Hollywood's
executives engage in such practices with relish. Who was it who
once explained that Hollywood is so suspicious of business because
Hollywood engages in so many commercial sharp practices itself? I
would remind you of the accuser's name, but we do not want him to
be added to Hollywood's present blacklist.
For a certitude Hollywood's Enron dramas will never have a role
for Paul Volcker. He is one of the business world's straight
arrows, and Hollywood would not know how to depict a straight arrow
riding in from Wall Street to clean up the Enron mess or at least
the accounting mess. Nonetheless in real life the ageless former
Fed Chairman and co-author of the Reagan-Volcker economic boom is
hard at work attending to the infelicities practiced by Enron's
accountants, Arthur Andersen. In so doing he is bringing down the
boom on that firm, striking alarm in the other Big Five accounting
firms, and attempting to restore investor confidence in corporate
America, by reforming the decidedly blowzy accounting practices
that have come to be practiced by some major corporations.
Ordinary Americans are amazed by accounting practices that allow
liabilities to be palmed off as assets. Since word of Andersen's
shredding of documents they have become increasingly dubious of
accounting practices. For instance, it is clear that large
accounting firms ought not also to be able to sell themselves to a
corporation as its accounting consultants. This is clearly a
conflict of interest.
Volcker, serving as a strict overseer of Andersen, is demanding
that accounting and accounting consultancies be handled by
different companies. Otherwise accountants have a vested interest
in tailoring their figures to conform with what their partners on
the consulting side of the firm counsel a corporation to do. If
they did not, their partners in the consultancy side of the firm
might be fired.
Volcker wants to end this practice not only at the ailing Arthur
Andersen but throughout the accounting industry. Just as he was a
sound money man in the late 1970s and early 1980s when stagflation
had to be slain, he is a sound accounting man today when funny
accounting practices threaten market integrity. Congressional
moralists are itching to get their hands on this issue and to solve
it with more onerous legislation. Better it is that Volcker have
his way.
Then Hollywood can make a move about how this big shambling
financial expert ambled out from the east coast. He cleans up an
accounting industry that was allowing corporate America to go the
way of Enron. And arrives in Hollywood at the age of 75 to become a
star. That's entertainment.
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is editor in chief of The
American Spectator.
topics:
Bill Clinton, Business, Books, Hollywood
