85,000 people lost their jobs so Lay and Skilling (and Junior) can stay out of the spotlight. Yahoo/Reuters reports that Arthur Andersen gets five years of probation and a half-million dollar fine for its role in obstructing justice during the Enron probe. Too late, though — the company's already all but dead.
A bunch of greedy idiots play around with off-balance sheet assets and finance the political campaigns of yet another idiot, and thousands of Enron shareholders have their pockets emptied while employees lose their life savings. A handful of idiots in a Texas office of Arthur Andersen misbehave, and more than 80,000 people lose their jobs.
An idiotic dictator plays around with Kuwait in 1990, and ordinary Iraqi citizens get a rain of bombs on their heads. An idiotic president does a half-ass job of proving to himself he's not a wimp, and leaves it to his idiot son and his idiotic advisers a decade later to screw Junior's "Crusade" up to the point where words like Armageddon become part of the basic vocabulary.
There are plenty of other examples too: Worldcom, Tyco, Ashcroft, Falwell, Robertson, bin Laden, the Vatican...
They're all variations on the same theme: so-called business, government and religious "leaders" who are undeserving of the word, let alone the position.
