Sparks: The fraudsters’ playbook: our study of Enron traders shows how easily the language of trust can be abused

Men in starched shirts sit in rooms of glass and steel, uttering the word 'reliability' while they move numbers on a page to subtract grain from a peasant’s bowl and warmth from a widow’s hearth.

Folks say these traders were masters of sincerity, which just goes to show that if you can fake being an honest man well enough, you can get the whole country to pay for your education.

Forget the moralists' shock; these men understood that the appearance of integrity is a far more potent tool for conquest than integrity itself, provided one maintains the leverage to keep the ledger hidden.

Watching a rogue use the vocabulary of a saint to empty a neighbor’s purse reminds me that a counterfeit coin only circulates because the public is too polite to ring it against the stone.

Examine this: the trader stole your property, which was never truly yours to keep, but he only corrupted your mind if you believed his words were the measure of your security.

What we call 'professional ethics' is merely the hegemonic dialect these predators use to ensure their victims view the very mechanisms of their own exploitation as natural laws of a civil society.

The claim of 'trust' depends entirely on the concealment of 'deceit,' and when both dissolve under scrutiny, you find neither a hero nor a villain, but only the empty conditions of a shifting contract.

The premises of their balance sheets were geometric impossibilities, yet the crowd accepted the conclusion because the traders spoke with the rhythmic certainty of a proof that no one bothered to calculate.

They talk about 'building trust' with fancy words, but I have felt the weight of a man's hand and seen the look in his eye, and no paper contract ever fed a hungry child.

There is something truly sublime about a man who can rob you of your life's savings while looking you in the eye and complimenting your local church’s choir.

They have painted the word 'Virtue' over the iron shutters of the exchange, but if you look closely between the brushstrokes, you can see the teeth of the men waiting inside.

Modernity tore down the old fence of 'thou shalt not steal' because it seemed too simple, only to find that the new wall of 'complex derivatives' was built specifically to hide the thieves.

Underneath the soft talk of the trading floor lies the same primordial snarl of the wolf, only these predators use a dictionary instead of fangs to strip the meat from the working man's bones.