<html> "You're perhaps the most accomplished confidence man since Charles Ponzi. I'd say you were a carnival barker, except that wouldn't be fair to carnival barkers." -SENATOR PETER G. FITZGERALD, in comments to Kenneth L. Lay, former chairman of Enron. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/13/business/13ENRO.html?todaysheadlines" eudora="autourl">http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/13/business/13ENRO.html?todaysheadlines </a>Enough of this Enron-Ponzi analogy.  Enron surely "pushed the envelope", but it's all pretty standard capitalism at the bubble stage of a business cycle.  An abstraction is rendered concrete in one particular instance, as a pile of "fictitious capital" was concentrated in one corporation and, when even a semblance of "valorization" could no longer be sustained, the whole thing vaporized. But fictitious capital is not a pile of Ponzi cash.  Now Albanian Gov't bonds in the early 1990's, _that_ was a Ponzi scheme.  Its collapse was a spark for the eventual Kosovo War. Sadly, even some leftists, otherwise educated in economics, can be seen joining in the Enron = Ponzi rhetoric. This not only diverts attention from the real causes - the normal workings of capitalism - but also steers us away from an interesting equation of contemporary forms of capitalist business organization with Al Qaeda, Inc.led by its CEO, the eminently capitalist Osama bin Laden.  Both featured a 'decentralized', distributed model consisting of thousands of relatively unaccountable "subsidiaries" engaged in dubious activities.  And, coincidentally, both went bust at the same time, though Al Qaeda may still have some staying power. But this equation has already been noted elsewhere and should be common currency with leftists by now, so cut the Ponzi crap already! -Brad Mayer</html>