[PEN-L:26992] Re: Arthur Anderson: guilty as charged

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 16/06/02 10:25 -0400, Louis Proyect wrote:
> I get a real satisfaction out of this. Back in 1988 I was at
> Goldman-Sachs when a large contingent of people from the Arthur
> Anderson consulting division came in to replace people like me, who
> had become dispensable. These were mostly snot-nosed kids in "power
> ties" and red suspenders who had only graduated from some ivy league
> college a few years earlier, while I had been designing systems for
> 20 years. Arthur Anderson was getting between $800 and $1000 a day
> for their services. It always seemed questionable to me that the
> number two man in the systems area had come to Goldman-Sachs from
> Arthur Anderson. I imagine that opening the doors to his former firm
> in this fashion would have profited him in some way.
>
> At the time Arthur Anderson represented the "cutting edge" of the new
> economy. Whether in systems or in accounting, they supposedly had
> some sort of divine gift for turning American companies into lean and
> mean profit-generating entities. It turned out that they were crooks
> just like the rest of the capitalist class.


Apparently one of the tricks of accountants is to add up from the left.
These approximate and fuzzy skills are fine when the market is rising but
are always in danger of exposure when money becomes scarce. They may then
gamble more dangerously.

A intellectually snobby British merchant bank accountant said to me in
connection with Enron, that the status of accountants in the USA is
somewhat lower than in Britain.  He implied US accountants are more like
technicians. This meant that, allegedly unlike the British accountants,
they would not take an overview of the network of interlocking Enron
companies. They would not see that the overall picture was unsound, but
would push the frame for each component company. Senior executives of Enron
were the only people able to see the whole picture of interlocking
companies. No doubt the British servants of finance capitalism are quietly
suggesting that their old boy networks are a safer way of managing capitalism,

It is not clear how much criminality was involved in this affair. Some yes,
but it is not entirely explicable by criminality. Some of the criminality
is a desparate consequence of the turn in the capitalist cycle and not a
cause of the collapse in a fundamental sense.

It is definitely misleading however to imply that the capitalist class are
*all*crooks. They are not. Nor is that a typical feature of the capitalist
class.  Marx is clear in analysing the process behind the accumulation of
surplus labour under capitalism was in a sense fair. Workers can also see
this intuitively. They may not hate Bill Gates and may hesitate, rightly,
to call him a crook.

In "the Production of Surplus Value" Section 2 of Chapter VII of Capital
Vol 1, Marx states "the laws that regulate the exchange of commodities have
in no way been violated. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent."

Capitalist exploitation is not theft.

Chris Burford