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Title: Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of Enron by Mimi Swartz ISBN: 1-85410-883-2 Publisher: Aurum Press Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 Format: Paperback

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: Failing to get the point
Comment: In Power Failure, Sherron Watkins portrays the Enron cronies as out-of-touch with us average working folks, in whose number she counts herself. However, the fact that Watkins is out-of-touch comes through a number of times. In one chapter describing the injustices of the yearly performance reviews, she laments, apparently without irony, a year when her boss "abandoned" her at review time and gave her a mere $14,000 bonus (or about 12 percent of her salary). There were other times, though, when Watkins "walked on water" and received a bonus higher than her gross pay.

She also recounts a conversation, during Enron's last days, with president Jeff McMahon about the pitiful severance package (a one-time payment of $4,000) given to all the employees (except those lucky executives who secured "retention bonuses" in the millions). McMahon makes the comment that most of the vice-presidents (like Sherron) "didn't need the money" anyway.

"'Most Enron vice presidents should have enough put away to live on for a year and still keep their kids in private school,' he asserted. 'Really, Jeff?' Sherron asked. 'I couldn't. Which vice presidents could do that?' The people he named were all managing directors-executives who had made millions. Listening to him, Sherron realized he'd lost touch with the way normal people-even upper-middle-class people-lived their lives." (p. 354)

While I can appreciate her indignation, as a "middle-class person" it is difficult to feel sympathy or camaraderie with someone who drew a salary of at least $150,000 per year (the highest figure mentioned in the book), received bonuses that would double that, and (though he is rarely mentioned) had a husband with a lucrative job himself. Is it too much to expect that they could survive for awhile without hitting the bread line? Or had Watkins succumbed to the very excesses she decries?

"She lay back on her pillow and considered her options. Christmas was fourteen days away. She estimated she had one, maybe two more paychecks coming, enough to cover one more house payment, and if she was lucky, a couple of Christmas bills...Four months from that moment, shecalculated, she would either have to sell the house or raid her retirement fund. Good-bye to thedamask tablecloths, the silk lampshades, the plantation shutters, the garden patio, the pretty tree-shaded street in the perfect neighborhood. Good-bye First Presbyterian preschool. Good-bye, for that matter, to the whole half-million Southampton starter package she was just getting used to. Sherron's stomach did back-flips. She could give it all up, sure...but after making an eight-year investment in her Enron career, was this really how it was all supposed to turn out?"(p. 342)

Power Failure demonstrates forcefully why the free market alone will never be what gives America her greatness. When unrestrained by conscience or morality, the free market leads only to the outrageous excesses of Enron (and WorldCom, Tyco, Kmart, ad infinitum). But when driven a passion for justice equal to that of profit, the free market will create, as it once did, a nation unsurpassed in blessing and prosperity.