And it remains to be seen, again, how well it'll do for long-term change, but the Sarbanes-Oxley accountability rules are scaring the shit out of big companies. They're aimed at making the high-paid execs -- at minimum, the CEO & CFO -- accountable for the operations. (I cover some of this stuff for a tech newswire. I'm really curious to see how well the current accountability kick does at shaping lasting reforms.)

These are incompatible objectives, and the folks who want to be guaranteed wealth for all time to come have been making thorough demonstrations of the respect in which they hold the law.

I shall stop now, before I start advocating Chestertonian socialism.

Kenneth Lay was one of W's biggest financial supporters. Now W is saying, "Um, yeah, what was that name? I think I may have heard of him..." If they prosecute Lay, he may sing about a lot of things...

Bush has problems of his own. Tonight's reports are that Bush has hired outside counsel for himself, to deal with the Plame affair.

It also makes me wonder about extremes. Why is it a fundamental part of human nature to take things to their extremes? Food is good. Let's not just have enough to fill our stomachs, let's have more. Sex is good. Let's start a porn company and make women objects rather than people. Money is good. Let's have more than we can ever spend in our lifetimes and make sure that no one can ever take it away from us.

I can say this about the conservative mindset, but I can also say it about the liberal mindset. When did unions lose track of why they were formed in the first place? The teacher's union here in Ontario just blacklisted my wife because she signed a contract with a district that was "pink listed". That means that new teachers weren't supposed to sign contracts with the district because the district was to be punished. We moved here from British Columbia and had no idea that the district was pinklisted. When we told them this, they said she should quit. They wanted her to quit her job, even though the district was delisted a week later. Incredible.

Maybe it's my inherent bitterness, but people suck. However, conservative people suck more.

How, if prices were high, it was because the Invisible Hand made them so, or maybe because there wasn't _enough_ deregulation?

God, I'd love to rub their noses in this.

Except . . . I doubt it would register. They'd say this wouldn't have happened if the Democrats had allowed drilling in wildlife preserves, or let coal plants get rid of pollution controls.

No doubt, no shame, no regrets.

Election day can't come soon enough.

Funny story. I know a guy who went to Yale at the same time as Dubya. So we asked our friend if he knew the junior Bush. He told us, no, [our friend] was very politically active in the Young Republicans, while Bush was always off partying with the frat boys.

I don't know if S-O will do any good, but it's a good time to be in document management.

The first story was Bush lawyering up for the Plame Grand Jury, then these Enron fuckers, including comments from a Democratic senator, then Pin the Leak on the White House Traitor again, this time for the leak to Chalabi while drunk, no less, then a non-story about General Karpinski shoplifting which did at least keep the torture story in the news.

Only after 3 solid stories about treason and daylight robbery by Bush&Co and one thin one about US torture related program activities did the show lapse into pap about Teens Take Drugs! Parents Shocked! for the final piece.

I seldom see CBS news (or any US news program) except in bits excerpted in Irish or UK shows and I was surprised that this show pulled so few punches. Is this unusual? A sign that CBS are turning on the White House?

I mean, it's pretty clear that the people being recorded didn't know that they were being recorded, given what they said. So then are these tapes from a government- (or, I suppose, competitor-) planted bug? Or do we have someone just recording what went on around their office ala Nixon?

Why did they say these things, knowing they were on tape? First, people "forget" after a while that they are under surveillance. Second, they may not have expected these tapes would ever be heard outside Enron. And third, exreme arrogance.

It horrifies me when people treat the abuses of the prison system as if they were part of the punishment. I find that comment above from "Ms Jen" about Abu Ghraib, with the gloating over the details, absolutely chilling.

If you don't give your enemies due process of law, yes, cruel and unusual punishment and Abu Ghraib is what you get. Don't wish for it.

The FERC impounded these tapes right after Enron's collapse. The lawyers for Washington State's civil suit against Enron (they got hit as bad or worse than California) finally pried them loose.

Their traders appeared to think that the fix was in because their friends were in power in DC:

One trader asks, "...all the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers of California?"

The second trader replies: "Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she's the one who couldn't figure out how to (expletive deleted) vote on the butterfly ballot."

Yes, but involuntary manslaughter is nothing to sneeze at.

Abu Ghraib was a shock. What made me truly depressed, though, was the realization that the people most directly implicated were "corrections professionals," people that work in prisons and prison administration here, in my country. All of a sudden, the fact that my culture obviously considers prison rape is as a reasonable part of punishment for incarcerated felons plunged me into despair. The scary truth is that the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib is not different either in type or degree from a large number of state and federal prisons here.

Look at the following exchange (via Kevin Drum):

"He just f---s California. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million."

"Will you rephrase that?"

"OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day."

That said, I've made comments like that myself. It's human to be angered by injustice, and to wish for extravagantly cruel comeuppances to those who are being deliberately unjust.

Still. In any sane future, our descendants will wonder how we live with America's grotesque prison system the way we wonder how 19th-century Americans lived with the constant presence of human slavery. Stunning statistics on this here.

A few people never seem to figure it out. I don't know why. (It may be a solved problem among developmental psychologists, which I'm not.) I suspect that may be a different problem than figuring it out, and then then abandoning the sense of how it works.

What if we had a completely open government? What if the intelligence community was entirely open source? What if by law there was no secrecy with organizations? What if everything regarding national security and budget were out there in the open and it was illegal to keep it from the eyes of the public (including corporate information, so places like Enron couldn't pull this crap)?

Would that be possible? I've been trying to think outside the box on several systems and since this is an intelligent community, I wonder if any of you think this would work (and please forego the "It'll never happen" arguement. I know it will never happen).

What if we had a completely open government? What if the intelligence community was entirely open source? What if by law there was no secrecy with organizations? What if everything regarding national security and budget were out there in the open and it was illegal to keep it from the eyes of the public (including corporate information, so places like Enron couldn't pull this crap)?

Would that be possible? I've been trying to think outside the box on several systems and since this is an intelligent community, I wonder if any of you think this would work (and please forego the "It'll never happen" arguement. I know it will never happen).

You know what? You're absolutely right. It was sleep deprivation. Innate was the wrong word to use. Also, please forgive the double post. My computer went all screwy.

It's not always good to have all your cards on the table. Sturgeon's "Mr. Costello, Hero" is also relevant here.

In a perfect world, they would be dissolved by court order and their assets seized to pay reparations for the damage they've done. But that is less economically advantageous to their victims (including the employees who were forced to buy their worthless stock) than letting them run as an estate indefinitely. One thing I'm sure of: no stockholder should ever get a single penny of dividend from this company again. ALL profits (should the company become profitable again) should go to reparations and restitution.

Yes, it's perfectly just to punish the stockholders. They elected the BOD who appointed Lay and his unholy kindred. There's a social good to punishing the stockholders of a company that commits outrageous crimes, as well: investors will shy away from companies they suspect are shady.

About prison abuse: remember a few things here: 1) false imprisonment happens every day. 2) The worst offenders are not the victims of prison abuse, but the perpetrators. 3) The victims of prison abuse are simply the most defenseless - i.e. the least hardened criminals, i.e. the most like you and me. (I'm talking chiefly about your standard beatings and rapes, not the systematic abuses as in Abu Ghraib, though those occur too, right here in the old US of A.)

Why does the United States, an allegedly "free" country, have a higher percentage of its population behind bars than any other country, including Russia? Why, because the for-profit prison industry protects its investment, of course. My usual rant against the for-profit prison industry is off-topic, so I'll just say this: there is one civilized country in the Western Hemisphere, and I don't live in it.

OK, let's start that again. T writes "If I were Empress of the Universe, there’d be a law saying that any executive who’s received a significant performance bonus any time in the last three years will not be allowed to plead ignorance about the operations of the company he’s been working for. What are all those obscene salaries for, if the people receiving them don’t know jack about their jobs?"

I spend a lot of time thinking about corporate responsibility -- I have now reached the point where, for example, I would be personally criminally responsible if there were a significant health & safety breach in my area. Am I able to see all the work my staff do? No. And I only have 19 staff, and we all sit together. Suppose I had 10,000? Across 80 sites?

What can I do? I can be personally irreproachable in word and deed (eg by never typing comments on webpages in working hours...). I can promote values, ways of behaving, standards, ethics. I can personally intervene when I see behaviour that does not meet those standards, and celebrate behaviour that does. I can work with my team to create a climate that means that everyone in the team feels confident that they can personally challenge behaviours.

Moving to planning. I can be aware of the top-level plans for the organisation; I can understand how, in broad terms, money is spent and made (er, for orgs which make money, which mine doesn't) within the organisation, I can understand the core business in principle. I can steer the work of my teams by outlining short and longer term objectives, ask my team leaders to plan against those objectives, and scrutinise those plans and monitor against them. I can make sure that people are trained to do their work, and know what action to take if there are gaps in that training.

And, well, that's about it. I can't see everything that's going on; I can't prevent collusive behaviour that's carefully hidden. I can't even prevent blithe incompetence other than in people who work for me directly, though I can support intermediate managers to some extent. I have far less control than this over every area apart from the one I run.

So when terrible things happen, the question that needs to be answered is 'could this have happened without the senior management either (a) knowing or (b) being insanely negligent in planning and monitoring'? Because if the answer to that question is no, then obviously it's heads on stakes time.

But where you have organisations where the leadership is doing what it can, imperfectly (because it's an imperfect process), where bad things are going on but being carefully and deliberately hidden from managers, and there's no reasonable way for the senior management to have identified those things (I'm not thinking here of, eg, the case where a contract is let to a hugely lower-priced tender who then turns out to be doing bad things; that's spottable), I am not sure it's reasonable to prosecute the management.

Ken Lay knew what was going on, he had to, because he set the corporate tone for Enron. Such attitude and arrogance was set from the top down.

In the end, nothing will happen to the "big guns" of Enron until Bush is out of office. As a corrupt and lying administration, they won't push prosecution because a trial will show the collusion between Cheney and Ken Lay when it comes to setting our nation's energy policy.

Grrrrr, I need to stop now, as I feel my blood pressure rising...

Also, depending on the jurisdiction, they might be charged with felony murder (i.e. they commit a different felony that results in someone's death; no intent on their part required). I don't know if there's a federal felony murder statute, and a court might be reluctant to go from wire fraud to felony murder, but one can hope.

What is just as bad in some ways is the dehumanizing effect of the unbeliveable bureaucracies that run prisons. There is a great, and macabre, example going around right now. From my experience it sounds about right.

And Repbublicans seem to stay bought.

Scorpio
Eccentricity

If the wire fraud is strictly federal, would CA law still apply WRT felony murder? I'm no lawyer, and this sort of thing makes my head spin.

Now, a civil wrongful death suit would be an entirely different matter...

I don't know what CA law is, but my state, Michigan, does not have a felony murder statute in the strict sense. In Michigan, a murder becomes first degree murder if committed in the course of certian specified felonies, but the killing must still be a murder--that is, the defendant must have posessed an intent to kill, or have acted in willful disregard of the fact that the natural and probable consequences of his action was death.

"Pure" felony murder leads to serious injustices, like defendants being convicted of first degree murder because the police shot someone helping the defendants commit a felony.

Our legal system isn't exactly a justice system. Until recently I was convinced it was at least striving for that ideal.

Yeah. They own the legal system. There might be a
few cosmetic prosecutions if there's too big an outcry, something to con the public into believing there's actual justice and oversight at work, but otherwise probably not. The reason these guys get such huge renumeration regardless of how companies they run are doing is because, well, giving them huge renumeration is *the point* as far as their class is concerned. The little people are just there to be fleeced in every way possible, both legal and illegal, and to pay the taxes.

The first is why are we surprised? Capitalism as promoted in this country is supposed to work like this. The business has one goal - to make more money - and complies with laws only in so far as it costs less to do so than to break them. Only people have morality and ethics and can make the decision that they are more important than profit. These people were apparently bereft of that quality, but I can't believe that had they held to the good and true they wouldn't have been fired and replaced, because that would maximise the company's profit.

The second is that businesses take advantage of being legally people in many ways, though this is in not way part of our constitution. People have rights. Businesses have no rights except in that they are made up of people and additionally we have granted them many rights as though they are people.

When people break the law enough, we lock them away forever or impose the death penalty. Businesses can do much much more before being "killed". Also, punishing the business often insulates the people inside the business who made the actual decisions, again allowing them to easily push their morality away. If it were really wrong, they think, they'd be punished for it, but they're not really, only the business is.

-andy, flooded with antibusiness cynicism

Who cares who dies? Those people should have known better than to rely on a public utility.

Observe the chain of events. It's inconsistent with your conclusions. The government's not giving Ken Lay the tiniest bit of help; quite the opposite, federal prosecutors are busting their asses trying to pin a charge on him. Hell, they pulled the cheapest trick they could find on Andrew Fastow to get him to squeal: they went after his wife, too, and made his kids part of the plea deal. The Bush administration *needs* Lay to go to prison, to counter conspiracy theories such as yours, and they're trying hard to do it. That they haven't done it yet is because Lay is a sly S.O.B.; it's not for lack of effort.

(And where did I hear about how hard the feds are trying? NPR. Yeah, there's your right-wing cover-up.)

This is not a breakdown in capitalism. This is not how business is "supposed to work." This is *one* particularly scummy company, run by particular scum, that defrauded all the businesses it dealt with in addition to its consumers. Nobody was patting them on the back except themselves.

And what was the result? Capitalism *worked*. They cooked the books as long as they could, but eventually they ran out of money, their lies imploded, and their house of cards fell. They self-destructed because they practiced bad capitalism. That's why the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies don't operate like Enron: it's bad business and unsustainable. Enron's death, and the _seppuku_ of Enron's sidekick Arthur Andersen, is an example to them. Never mind the prison terms, other CEOs contemplating this will be scared off by the Enron stock being sold as a novelty on EBay.

There are a lot of things the Bush administration can be blamed for (and I do, and I decided a little while ago that I cannot morally vote for him), but this is not one of them. There are also some legitimate shortcomings in modern U.S. industry, but this is not one of them. This is a singular example of poisonous corporate culture, an aberration, and the guys who poisoned it are getting what's coming to them. Ken Lay will get his, too, and believe me, Bush and Cheney will both breathe sighs of relief when he does.

I apologize that my tongue-in-cheek/bad black humor response was seen as thinking that the Abu Ghraib prison horrors ought to be a regular part of prison treatment. I don't think that.

Teresa had stated that if she were empress she would hold them into accountability to the full extent of the US Law, and then Paula said in her comment that she would have Mr. Lay cut off at the knees.

My response was a flippant taking off of Paula's post to the far extreme given that, in my mind, the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration's discounting of them seem to be very similar to their similar discounting of Enron and Mr. Lay's responsibility. The connection being in Bush administration's lack of willingness to be accountable and hold others in high positions accountability, not in the connection between level of horror.

My bad. This is what I get for starting everyday by reading the comics rather than the front page.

Going after Lea Fastow wasn't much of a stretch, considering she was an assistant treasurer of Enron and was a principal in several of the shell corporations set up to hide Enron's debt.

Then they cooked up a plea bargain that would ensure the Fastows wouldn't be in jail at the same time, a heart-warming concern for their children that I don't think many federal prosecutors show to people charged with drug possession. This was such egregious favoritism that the judge threw the bargain out.

Given the Adelphia, HealthSouth, Tyco, and WorldCom prosecutions, it's hard for me to see Enron as unique.

Then they cooked up a plea bargain that would ensure the Fastows wouldn't be in jail at the same time, a heart-warming concern for their children that I don't think many federal prosecutors show to people charged with drug possession. This was such egregious favoritism that the judge threw the bargain out.

Of course, the whole point of the bargain was to convince Fastow to testify against Lay. That's the point I'm making -- not whether or not the Fastows deserve time (it seems they do), but that Lay is in the crosshairs.

Given the Adelphia, HealthSouth, Tyco, and WorldCom prosecutions, it's hard for me to see Enron as unique.

Excellent point. And what do they have in common? They're all being prosecuted. Someone tell me again how this is evidence of the federal government wanting to ignore all this.

Excuse me. Lea Fastow is not a ditzy housewife. She is an educated, professional businesswoman who was an integral part of the shenanigans. She was involved in using her kids' bank accounts to play the financial shell game. There was nothing at all "cheap" about going after her.

Was it harsh? Sure. But you know, you play the game and you take your chances. If the Fastows didn't want their kids to have Mommy and Daddy jail, they should have kept their hands out of the cookie jar. You want cheap? Cheap is hiding ill-gotten gains under your toddler's name, and then whining that the poor tot will be traumatized if you face the consequences for it.

Yes, the point of the plea deal was to flip Fastow. And that is why the legal system doesn't appear to be "doing anything" about Ken Lay. They want to flip all his little henchmen good so they can truly, finally nail him to the wall.

I'm proud to say that Inslee is MY congresscritter, and a better Democratic representative you could hardly hope to find. He's also the one who held the Iraq intelligence panel where Ambassador Wilson made the famous 'frog-march' comment, strongly supports the Apollo Energy Initiative, and answers his constituents' emails, letters, and phone messages scrupulously. If you find it in your heart to give a nod to one of the many incumbents being heavily targeted by the GOP, or live in a solidly red Congressional District, take a look at supporting Inslee.

How many have been missed or ignored? Why is it mete and just that only Lay should suffer the full penalty of the law?

Why has Haliburton not been effectively prosecuted?

Why were the SEC regulations altered, and its regulatory ability diminished?

Why is the responsibility of a corporations board of directors maximization of profit, and why does the translation of that into 'share price at all costs' serve the public interest? (that particular change happened in my lifetime, and I'm scarcely middle aged.)

There's a lot to tax government with the regulatory structure of corporations, even without getting to environmental issues.

Why are you changing the subject? The point I was addressing, and the topic of this thread, is Lay and Enron. Having a consensus here that it is mete and just for Lay to suffer the full penalty of the law, I was attempting to correct some misconceptions here and point out that the present administration wants that too, and are fighting to get it. I've said nothing about Haliburton, and the news article doesn't say anything about Haliburton either. As for the SEC -- whatever you think their problems are, in this case they're doing the right thing.

Why is the responsibility of a corporations board of directors maximization of profit, and why does the translation of that into 'share price at all costs' serve the public interest? (that particular change happened in my lifetime, and I'm scarcely middle aged.)

Um. The goal of a for-profit corporation is to make profit. If it doesn't make a profit it goes out of business. Most corporations strive for the opposite of going out of business. I really hope that does not require explanation, nor do I think you're questioning that the mission of a corporation is ultimately the mission of its board of directors. If you disagree, I'd be interested in your proposal for an alternative.

As for "share price at all costs," I happen to agree with you -- and corporations are starting to grok that total disregard for their customer base and their society is bad for business. Many corporations do understand that the intangible benefit of reputation is worth far more than the minor costs involved in maintaining it. (I'm not just reciting platitudes here. I work at the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 50 company, one that's been in business for 97 years, and I can tell you with certainty that anyone caught making wisecracks about our customers like these Enron quotes would not be back the next day.)

Yes, there are exceptions. Lots of them. The sea is full of sharks, and corporate cultures vary hugely. What I don't understand is the attitude some seem to have that American industry is bad in principle. The bad guys need to be punished, yes. But if we got rid of all of it -- where would we get our burgers, books, and computers for our blogs?

Which won't happen, and only a lunatic fringe wants to happen, so why raise the issue?

I don't believe this. I think some children are taught, or not corrected when they figure it out for themselves, that there are rewards connected to wrong behavior that exceed the possible downside, and they're pretty easy to catch in the early stages. I think it's part of the envelope pushing process - they transgress to see if this is the place where they're stopped, if they either get away with it or if it's too much trouble for the adults to keep after it.

This is (as you know) a damn hard job.

I'm very tired of "the criminals have all the inititive, and anything we do in response is all *their* fault".

Please go back and read what I actually wrote, thank you very much.

Perhaps you missed the fact that, in fact, Lea Fastow was allowed to plea-bargain for a very reduced sentence, so that she could be out of jail to care for her children. Because I can't imagine you're arguing that having children is a Get Out Of Consequences Free card. Perhaps Ken Lay should get a young thing who collaborated with him on Enron knocked up--you know, as an ace in the hole, so to speak?

Here Enron/Worldcom antics find the responsible parties (beneficiarie$)toppling the personal savings/retirement plans for the trusting multitudes, laughing all the way to the bank, and somehow able to dodge prosecution/fein ignorance and ultimately serve a sentence a fraction of what is ethically due.

Each shareholder whose lives are inextricably altered by the fiasco must serve the balance of their lives (their life sentence) working longer hours, scrimping, making tough decisions (they wouldn't be facing otherwise), living a meeker quality of life as a result of the greed of the few (charged).

And meanwhile our prison system houses 2.1 million Americans, many of whom are there because of mandatory minimums stemming from charges based ON CONSENSUAL BEHAVIOR (drug sales). We have 5% of the world's population, yet it's fascinating that we house 25% of the world's population of incarcerated. We can't build housing for prisoners (captive minimum wage employees) fast enough. And those criminals, the poorest among us, the voiceless 2.1 million it turns out are the paltry mass of humanity providing job security for what is perhaps the fastest growing branch of government (outside of Homeland Security).

What do you think? Is the War on Drugs working?

One thing is certain; the new prisons aren't being built for the elite con men at the top of the food chain.. it will be home to druggists; YOUR SON, YOUR DAUGHTER, YOUR NEPHEW.. in other words THE NON-VIOLENT INEPT NINCOMP-OOPS ENGAGED IN CONSENSUAL BEHAVIOR. These young people aren't nearly as slick/devious/educated as the Worldcom Execs.

Disclaimer: The preceding was not written out of a position of condoning drug use or drug sales. I'm a child of the fifties, and write because of the glaring inequities & inconsistencies that permeate our legal system & American value system.

Tain't what we all thought we'd inherit is it?

This smacks of excuses. Let me say that the sea doesn't have to be full of sharks, and corporate cultures can vary without being corrupt.

What I don't understand is the attitude some seem to have that American industry is bad in principle. The bad guys need to be punished, yes. But if we got rid of all of it -- where would we get our burgers, books, and computers for our blogs?

That's a straw man argument. The attitude you are actually encountering is one of outrage over actual corporate behavior that was illegal, unethical, and probably killed people. Also, you seem to have been missing the attitude of extraordinary selfishness and irresponsibility that has been passing for corporate and political leadership over the last several years. I am not against corporations, I work for one. But I am absolutely opposed to corruption. My comforts of life do not depend on corrupt corporate behavior. On the contrary, they depend on responsible behavior where society works together. Profit is a part of that, but only a part.

The monomaniacal pursuit of profits, regardless of the consequences, is supposed to be a virtue, but as Enron has shown, when the consequences are bankruptcy, blackouts, market crashes, and the destruction of companies and careers, it kind of makes you wonder whatever happened to the profit.

"making a profit" is necessary, certainly, but it's not of itself an abstract good. (You can, after all, turn a fine profit running a kidnapping ring, and the fact that this is a profitable business does not excuse it.)

So what I'm objecting to is not making a profit, that necessary thing, but the legal requirement to maximize profit. (In effect, quarterly profit.)

There's a perfectly useful business model that says 'go for reliable profit'; it was used up until 1970 or so and that law change concerning shareholder obligations.

The problem I have with the prosecution working its way up to Ken Lay is that it means everybody below him in the food chain gets to plea bargain to a certain extent. I'd greatly prefer that they all be hoeing turnips somewhere very dull until they die of their age.

And the reason people don't trust the justice system would seem to be obvious -- reduction in funding of regulatory oversight, reduction in the scope of regulatory oversight, comments from the executive that regulatory oversight is what's wrong with business today after Enron's massive fraud became public knowledge, the habit of paying immense bonuses to executives on what turn out to be fraudulent accounting numbers under contracts which do not allow recovery of those bonuses; it's pretty much obvious to the meanest intelligence that the system is a fair way along the road to becoming a wealth concentrator for the already wealthy, rather than a machine for making opportunity generally available.

1) Become CEO of an established company.
2) Instill a corporate culture of "anything goes" and hire ruthless, aggressive managers to run things.
3) Cook up crazy schemes to defraud your customers and to cover up the fact that you are actually losing lots of money.
4) Crash and burn, taking down the company, ruining the lives of your employees and the fortunes of your investors. Hire lawyers and pray you won't do hard time.
5) PROFIT!

You might enjoy reading a book by someone who agrees with you on Totally Open Government, and has throught through many implications:

The Transparent Society, by David Brin

Suppose you started out thinking that profit-making corporations are basically evil. Now, you see a big scandal, in which a bunch of companies' managements were doing all kinds of illegal and unethical things to make their stock prices look good, and thus to maximize their own take. You're likely to walk away from that with a re-enforced belief that corporate culture and the profit motive are bad things, which lead inevitably to abuses. If you started with the idea that corporations and the profit motive were basically forces for good, you'd likely take the same scandals as a few bad apples.

More thoughtful people on both sides of that try to look deeper. For example, many people who are deeply pro-capitalism have responded to all these scandals by thinking a lot about why the scandals happened, and what changes to the rules, to corporate governance, to how the auditors are paid, etc., might make it better.

The same thing happens in reverse when the scandal is in governnment, right? Alice sees the videotapes of the congressman taking a briefcase full of money and says "Washington culture and government regulation of industry lead to just this kind of corruption." Bob sees the same thing and says "Gee, I'm glad they got that guy. The system seems to be working."

--John Kelsey

*Lots* of community service. As in, about 100,000 hours of community service.

That's 40 years' worth of 50-hour work weeks. For no pay...Actually, no, set a small percentage of his money aside and pay him minimum-wage.

Sure, it's not exactly fire and the sword, but he'd be doing something that might actually repay his debt to society. And for those who think community service is soft, there are always less-clerical community-service jobs out there. Clearing poison ivy. Shoveling manure. And yes, I volunteer at a charity where both jobs are done on a daily basis. <slightly predatory grin />

Intel is a lot like poker, and the game can't be played if all the cards are on the table.

That said, too much is classified, and far too much of what needs to be classified is both overclassified, and classified too long.

Without plea bargaining, they stay free on bail and cost us, and the legal system, tons of money with an uncertain prosecution. Ken Lay could die peacefully of old age before full trials for all the underlings.

And remember that this thing gathers momentum. The people who flipped early, the ones who got off light, were not the higher-ups with so much more to lose. They saw what was coming, and their testimony adds to the ammunition against those who hedged, and stalled, and tried to dodge the consequences.

These boys are used to paying fines; they don't care. Jail, now, that I don't think they were quite expecting.

I'm sorry, who said that? Where? Oh, it was the mysterious "attitude some seem to have". I tell you what, if you find them, you can go argue with them.

You're accepting as a given a legal system which involves an enormous amount of structural delay. There's supposed to be a right to a speedy trial lurking around here somewhere.

Just for reference, that was Steve Eley who wrote that. I think you've confused the two names.

To comment on the statement that was attributed to me, I don't have any problem with the attitude that America's psychopathic maximize-profit-at-all-cost corporatism is bad in principle.

However, American industry and America's corporate governance structures are different things. So believing that the latter are bad in principle (which I do) is not the same as believing that the former is (which I don't).

Toleration of cheaters in academe creates an attitude that cheating is okay, even the best route to go. It isn't the Enron trader's fault, going by the logic of your Blog--nobody at the University of Kent (or Harvard, or Yale, etc) told them that ripping off Grandma Millie was wrong!

Teresa isn't apologizing for the plagiarist.

In this thread folks are calling on various government entities to be more vigilant to stop corruption. In that thread folks are calling on the University of Kent to be more vigilant to stop corruption.

Do you see the connection now?

One audio clip from Enron's West Coast trading desk recorded a trader giving instructions on how to profit from artificially the power grid, utility officials said.

"If the line's not congested then I look to see if I can congest it," the unidentified Enron trader says on tape. "If you can congest it, that's a money maker no matter what because you're not losing any money to move it down the line. You're just making money."

Utilities repeatedly paid Enron to relieve congestion on the West Coast electricity grid.

Why yes, I still am that naive.

HOUSTON (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors are expected to ask a federal grand jury to indict former Enron Corp. chairman Ken Lay within two weeks on charges related to the company's 2001 collapse, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The Houston Chronicle, citing unnamed sources, said Lay likely would face fraud charges similar to those filed earlier against former Enron chief executive office Jeffrey Skilling and former Enron chief accounting officer Richard Causey.

Those two have been indicted on multiple charges including insider trading, securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy and lying about Enron finances.

Next, if he's convicted, I'd like to see him given a sentence that's comparable, in terms of days imprisoned per dollars stolen, to sentences for nonviolent larceny handed out to persons who are dark-skinned, poor, and ill-educated.

MKK

My favorite sentence:

"The fraud, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which filed civil charges, ran from 1998 to February 2003, and included a smorgasbord of tactics including tango sheets, cookie jar reserves, candy deals and channel stuffing - some accounting maneuvers that are well known and others that were devised by the former Symbol executives."

The new CEO is a Mr. Nuti.