Why is Ken Lay smiling? mmw at bad things rightly points out that I have a tendency to vanish whenever my pet bugaboo, the Enron scandal, heats up. I'm afraid I don't have much to add now that Kenny Boy has been indicted, except that no matter what happens to him beyond this point it was all worth it for him.
For the small sum of a half-million dollars he managed to help get a man into the White House who now avoids even a mention of him as if it were some rare form of Texan cancer, but who allowed Lay to secretly dictate energy policy with the avid cooperation of Dick Cheney.
Lay's indictment and the handcuffs are a piece of theatre designed for mass media consumption. Lay's little stroll was about the smilingest perp walk I've ever seen.
And the money. Oh, the money. The highest estimate I've seen so far is that he could be fined as much as $5 million. Even if he had to pay the maximum fine, by my calculations, that would still earn him a 1800% return on his investment (i.e., the fine, relative to the $90 million he stole from Enron shareholders). Seems generous, especially compared to what your savings account offers these days. That is, if you have any money left, as so few former Enron employees appear to do.
Supposedly he has less than $20 million left of the original $90 million he stole, but that's because he was given three years to hide $70 million. Don't you think you could do that with a combination of offshore accounts and annuities that pay you income for life (but without the messy accountability of being able to be seized by legitimate creditors, even by court order)?
Why is this man smiling? Because he got away with it. Even if they fine him the maximum, he got away with it.
John Emerson at Seeing the Forest provides a nice compendium of handy Enron links for your amusement or outrage as the case may be.
Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.
It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.
The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.
The dissenting views regarding Iraq's weapons programs in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, and the cautionary notes sounded by intelligence analysts at the Energy and State departments regarding nuclear matters, and the Air Force's concern regarding Iraq's unmanned aerial vehicle program all fell on willfully deaf ears. In contrast, the CIA's analysis of terrorism, which found only weak connections between Iraq and al Qaeda, elicited considerable questioning from policymakers. Undoubtedly, this was because the administration's decision to invade Iraq had already been made.
[...]
The responsibility for problems related to prewar intelligence regarding Iraq should not be confined to intelligence analysts at the CIA but should extend to policymakers as well -- particularly those at the Defense and State departments, the National Security Council, and the White House.
Likewise, the same parties must be held accountable for the color-coded, duct-tape fakery behind the terrorism alerts that Tom Ridge is told to trot out whenever it's politically expedient.
