Enron

Throughout the late 1990s, Enron was almost universally considered one of the country's most innovative companies -- a new-economy maverick that forsook musty, old industries with their cumbersome hard assets in favor of the freewheeling world of e-commerce. The company continued to build power plants and operate gas lines, but it became better known for its unique trading businesses. Besides buying and selling gas and electricity futures, it created whole new markets for such oddball "…

…rather than on the dependent relationship between local elites and transnational capital. Yet now that we have a blatant case of crony capitalism in the United States, we don't hear that phrase used by the corporate media. Unless we uses this scandal as an opportunity to clean up the system and make significant changes in the structure of corporate governance, this will be seen around the world as just one more case of American hypocrisy.