Ladies and gentleman, for my first column of my fourth semester as a Collegian columnist, I wish for you to join me in a discussion of the tremendous and most heinous fall of the energy-giant Enron.

Okay, I know what you are saying to yourselves: "He's writing about Enron? Doesn't he know that Bush choked on a pretzel last week? For the love of God, write about the pretzel! Write about the flippin' pretzel!"

Yes, it would be fun to write about the pretzel. It's been almost a year since I've given our president a hearty lampoon. But trust me, my contemporary peers, this Enron thing is huge, and frankly as cloistered college students we've been underexposed to the situation.

In the entire history of the Collegian, student writers have typed the word "Enron" only four times (this column, thus far, has doubled the all-time total). Contrast that with the 871 times that the word Enron has appeared in headlines on the news wires in only the last seven days. So needless to say, there's something going on with this Enron matter to which we collegiate folk haven't been paying much attention.

If you're like me, the arcane workings of corporate America don't much excite the spirit or capture the imagination. Thus, when the Enron story began to break in November, I only paid cursory attention to it. After all, we are a generation that came to age during the bursting of the Internet tech bubble; we've seen countless "huge" companies go under in the last three years (remember Pets.com anyone?). Enron must be of a similar nature, no?

No. Enron was a giant. How giant a giant? Giant-in-all-capital-letters giant. Its revenues for the 2000 fiscal year were $100 billion. Contrast that with Microsoft, which only amassed a paltry $22 billion of revenue in its last fiscal year. So with almost five-times the revenue of Microsoft, why is it that Enron was never a household name? Mostly because Enron's dealings were in the trading of energy commodities and utilities, and I don't know about you, but such is a topic to which I pay little attention.

Based out of Houston, Texas, Enron experienced its wild growth under the guiding hand of its chairperson and CEO, Mr. Kenneth Lay. Lay developed Enron from a small Texas-company that dealt primarily with oil and gas pipelines to a global energy provider with seven times the revenue of McDonald's. As Enron grew, Lay made sure that state and national politicians were aware of this burgeoning energy superstar, and did what any self-respecting corporate administrator in America would do- grease the hands of any and every politician that, well, had hands.

And grease hands he did. Since 1989, Enron has donated almost $6 million to political candidates and causes. Enron holds the record as the all-time top donor to our president's campaigns, and Attorney General Ashcroft had to recuse himself from the federal probe into Enron's collapse because of generous campaign donations he received from the energy-provider.

Such donations allowed Enron to operate with unparalleled freedom. In fact, such little scrutiny had been placed on Enron that its top brass, along with their accounting firm Arthur Andersen, had been able to lie about the financial situation of the corporation for years without anyone realizing their deceptions. The success of the company had been built on false promises and inflated truths, and the illusion was only able to stay convincing for so long.

As Enron began to unravel early last year, Lay and 28 others at the top unloaded $1.1 billion worth of stock. All the while Lay continued to tell Enron employees that everything was fine and that the financial future of Enron looked bright.

Unfortunately for the employees, their 401(k) retirement plans were based largely upon company stock, and according to the rules of their plan, they were unable to touch the stock until they turned 54. So as Enron's stock plummeted from $90 to sixty-five cents a share, the employees were powerless to save themselves from the descent.

It'd be like having your boots bolted to the promenade deck of the Titanic.

For those of us who have been following the Enron story, this seems like familiar material. But I'm recounting the issue for those of us who have not been following the story, and who might skip over news articles about Enron's collapse for fear of their heads exploding from boredom.

If you are one of those people that has been avoiding the Enron story, I highly recommend that you to begin following it. As college students, we will seldom find a more telling glance into the inside world of corporate dealings- a world where (gasp!) CEOs sometimes care more about their own bank account than their thousands of employees and a world where (gasp!) political power is attained through the check book and not the ballot box.

I hate to be a downer, but this is the world into which we are being propelled. By paying close attention to the Enron collapse, we can ensure that it's a world we do not stumble into blindly.