Movie implies widespread complicity in Energy Crisis

If reports that Gray Davis felt vindicated after watching Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room are true, then he must not have seen the same movie as Boston Globe Reviewer Ty Burr. In his movie review, Burr notes:

Who do you blame for Enron? Start with Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow, of course, respectively, the fallen energy behemoth's founder, president, and chief financial officer/insane greedhead/designated scapegoat.

But what about the state and federal regulators who consistently gave the company a free pass, in part thanks to Lay's friendship with both George Bushes?

What about the accountants at Arthur Andersen who signed off on Enron's three-card-monte approach to bookkeeping?

What about the banks that funded the company, the analysts who pushed the stock, the journalists who sold Enron as a bastion of innovation and integrity?

What about anyone who bought the stock without caring that the numbers didn't add up?

The strength of Alex Gibney's entertaining and enraging "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" isn't just that it simplifies the best-selling book by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind so that mere mortals can understand what happened.

The new documentary says that everyone on the bandwagon was complicit; it implies, moreover, that the timbers of the bandwagon itself were rotten with go-go avarice.

"Go-Go Avarice" sounds like the perfect term to describe the former-Governor's fundraising prowess.