The journey from there to here

Barring those with an exceptionally short attention span, anyone who reads me will know that I am a HUGE fan of baseball. Several family vacations have specifically centered around the sport, including one where I "sacrificed" an AL baseball hit off of the bat of Ken Griffey, Jr. in batting practice at Milwaukee County stadium into the cornfield in Dyersville, Iowa, in the year 2001 as a "sacrifice" to the Gods of baseball in hopes the Yankees would lose the series (they did). And so, it was slightly puzzling to me in the year 2000, as the Houston Astros unveiled their new, state of the art stadium, named after one of the corporate giants in Houston. At the time, I was quite puzzled; I had never heard of "Enron", and could not imagien a connection to baseball that would lead to them paying to name the new stadium.

What a difference a few years can make.

Today, the jury in the trials of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling returned guilty verdicts for each, pretty much guaranteeing that these men who dined on caviar and sipped champagne a few short years ago will soon be settling for mystery meat and cheap coffee.

While I have become quite jaded overall, I am personally quite happy with the verdict. The fraud of the company these two men headed almost singlehandedly brought the stock market to a collapse from which it is just now recovering. Retirement funds were lost and the average joe lost faith in the stock market, feeling they had been duped by their brokers.

I personally hope that this criminal finding can lead to a civil suit against the two men, to return just a portion of their assets to the retirement funds of the employees and investors from whom they effectively stole large quantities of money.


Comments
on May 28, 2006

Ah!  The joys of disagreement.  I will disagree with you, slightly!  And then use your own words in my defense!  yea, I am a stinker!

I dont beleive they set out to deceive anyone, and in the end, while they did some, they did not do it with the intent they were convicted of, nor with the malice aforethought!  No.  Does that mean they do not merit the sentence (they are not going to get 176 years!)?  No.

When you gamble big, you gamble big!  They gambled big and lost. And the stakes for them was not a few thousand or million dollars, it was their freedom (I figure each will get 20 years).  That is why the CEOs and CFOs get paid big bucks.  The smart ones know how to skewer the odds so they always win.  The bad ones will be the losers.  But they gambled and lost.

So bottom line, I am not sorry.  But then I am not happy.  I dont gamble so I do not care what happens to those who do. They get what they deserve.

Live large, gamble big.  Lose, and money is the least of your worries.

on May 31, 2006
The fact there was a report no-one bothered to read from the risk department detailing the potential for Enron to collapse exactly as it did (minus a few extra collapsy thing that were kept from the risk assessment team) makes me feel that it could have been prevented, and should have been prevented. The report he did commission said that Enron could survive a global disaster. Of course, he didn't care whether Enron could survive its credit rating being downgraded. It makes me sad.