The Enron building and the Transco Tower are my two favorite buildings in Houston. I’ve taken lots of photos of both. These are some of the Enron building. I chose these because, in my opinion, it isn’t immediately obvious what makes them special.
The beautiful towers sustained damage after Hurricane Ike.
Filed under Enron
FinancialNews.com is jumping into the Enron fray with a post updating readers about the “Enron cast.” It isn’t the first time I’ve heard that strange vernacular, but it always rankles. The executives – and workers for that matter – were not characters in a play or daytime soap drama, but actual people. It is wrong to frame them as “cast” or “characters” as the article frames them:
Incidentally are we trading billionaires now? That is a teensy market.
Sayeth the article:
Jeff Skilling, chief executive (February 2001- August 2001), previously chief operating officer and president
Skilling is currently serving a 24-year jail sentence for fraud and insider trading, but the former Enron chief executive is continuing to push his case for innocence through the US legal system. His lawyers have fought a series of battles at various levels of seniority in the US court system, and on various grounds of appeal.
His latest challenge came in September this year, when lawyers filed an appeal against an April 2011 ruling that upheld a potential error in the guidance that led to his 2006 conviction.
He had appealed the 19 out of 28 charges he was sentenced for in 2006 all the way up to the US Supreme Court last year. His lawyers challenged ruling based on the guidance given to the jury that asked them to consider whether he had deprived his company of intangible honest services. The US Supreme Court found on June 24, 2010, that he had not violated the honest services rule as he had not solicited or accepted bribes or kickbacks, but rather he conspired to defraud Enron’s shareholders by other means.
The US Supreme Court then passed its ruling down to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to consider whether this should alter his conviction. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled this April that it should not alter his conviction. It is this ruling that Skilling’s lawyers are currently appealing.
Skilling’s son, John Taylor Skilling, 20, died in February this year. Jeff Skilling was not allowed out of prison to attend the funeral.
His law firm was unavailable for comment at time of going to press.
I cringe when I read these things about his family. His son’s death was impossibly tragic. I feel like children of executives (or anyone in the public eye for that matter) are off-limits. They didn’t choose their parents and they don’t have anything to do with their parents’ actions. JT’s death is sacred, and journalists and others just toss it around like it is nothing. It deserves more reverence than it is ever given. It seems like it is used salaciously, to attract the idle curious, and not actually people who care to know what Jeff Skilling is really about. The only alternative I can think of is not to discuss it at all. It is none of our business. It is a deep and intensely private pain that Jeff Skilling and his family will have to heal from, without it being rehashed in the news.
Ken Lay, chief executive and chairman (January 1987- February 2001, August 2001- January 2002)
Lay was convicted of 10 counts of fraud and conspiracy in two cases against him on May 25 2006 and faced up to 165 years in prison. He was due to be sentenced on October 23 2006. However, he died of a heart attack while on holiday skiing in rural Colorado in July 2006.
Following his death, a federal judge vacated Lay’s conviction, wiping out the jury verdict. US District Judge Sim Lake agreed with Lay’s lawyers that his death required his conviction be erased. They cited a 2004 ruling that found that a defendant’s death pending appeal extinguished his entire case, as he hadn’t had a full opportunity to challenge the conviction.
So that’s where he is? That’s what he’s up to? This is inane. It just rehashing old facts. It bothers me, and I’m not sure why. I just know it does.
Andrew Fastow, chief financial officer (March 1988 – October 2001)
Fastow, who will celebrate his 50th birthday on December 22, faced a 10-year prison term but was given a six-year sentence, handed down on September 26, 2006, as a result of cooperation with prosecutors.
He is now serving the final weeks of his prison sentence and is due to be released on December 17, when he will begin two years of probation. He will have served just shy of five years and three months.
Earlier this year, he was moved from prison to a halfway house in Houston in preparation of his release. He is allowed to leave the home for work, medical and religious reasons.
He is currently working full-time as a “document review clerk” for the law firm that defended him in civil matters over the last decade, Smyser Kaplan & Veselka. The Houston-based firm confirmed he was a full-time employee. He was not available for comment.
Rehashed almost word for word from Tom Fowler’s Houston Chronicle article.
J Clifford Baxter, chief strategy officer (1992 – May 2001)
Cliff Baxter committed suicide on January 25, 2002, after being subpoenaed by a Congressional committee investigating Enron which he was expected to give evidence to.
He had been named in a letter from whistleblower Sherron Watkins as an executive who had complained about the ethics of some Enron transactions. He was also named in several law suits against Enron, but was not at the forefront of the scandal.
Again, is that where he is?
Lou Pai, chief executive of Enron Energy Services (March 1997 – May 2001)
Pai is the founder and chairman of Element Markets, a renewable energy company that is now home to several former Enron senior employees.
He had resigned from Enron six months before it filed for bankruptcy. Pai cashed out almost $300m in Enron stock in May 2001– just before the company’s collapse.
In July 2008 he agreed with the SEC to pay $31.5m in fines and disgorged profits, including $6m previously forfeited for the benefit of Enron shareholders. The SEC alleged that Pai sold Enron stock in May and June 2001 on the basis of material, non-public information concerning Enron. Pai simultaneously settled with the SEC without admitting or denying the allegations.
Lou Pai was never accused (criminally) of anything. Therefore, he’s a private citizen. I don’t know why people insist on updating us on him. He’s doing private citizen stuff. Leave him alone.
Rick Causey, chief accounting officer (1999 – April 2002)
The former top accountant at Enron pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy charges and agreed to testify against Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. He was released in October this year, after going to prison in January 2007.
He now advertises himself on professional networking website LinkedIn as an independent accounting professional who has “experienced first-hand the accounting, finance, corporate governance and cultural issues that can impact a company”.
Again, almost a cut and paste from Tom Fowler’s article in the Houston Chronicle.
Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche, chief executive of Enron International (1996 – August 2000)
Mark-Jusbasche resigned her post at Enron in August 2000 and sold her stock in the company for $80m just before its collapse. She was never accused of wrongdoing in the ensuing series of prosecutions
But in early 2005 she agreed to pay $5.2m made from the sale of her shares in Enron to settle her share of a lawsuit brought by former Enron stockholders. She was one of 18 named defendants in a lawsuit brought by the University of California, the lead plaintiff for investors in Enron, in a $186m case.
She is currently the president of a company called Resource Development Partners, an oil and gas consultancy firm. She is also on the advisory board of Plebys International, an emerging market-focused venture capital firm.
Again, private citizen. Her life is her own business.
Sherron Watkins, vice president of corporate development (1993 – November 2002)
Watkins was the whistleblower in the Enron scandal when she warned Ken Lay in an anonymous letter that Enron would “implode in a wave of accounting scandals”. Her letter led to an investigation by Enron’s law firm Vinson & Elkins.
She has co-authored a book called Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, and is a public speaker on Enron and ethics in business.
She now makes a living through public speaking and consultancy through her advisory firm, Sherron Watkings & Company.
And she’s an insider trader. Please quit leaving out that part. And – show of hands – who else is sick to death of seeing her as the unofficial spokesperson for All Things Enron? She was a low level employee. She never led anyone, not a group or a person. She knew nothing. And apparently still knows nothing.
Vincent J Kaminski, managing director for research (1992 – 2002)
Kaminski was managing director for research at Enron and warned that Fastow’s SPVs were unethical and could bring down the company.
After Enron, he worked at hedge fund Citadel Investment Group, Reliant Energy and Sempra Energy. He has also worked at Citigroup.
He is currently a professor at Rice University in Houston and teaches MBA level classes on energy markets, risk management and valuation of energy derivatives. He is also a capital markets consultant.
And he is a private citizen who was never charged with anything so none of this is any of our beeswax.
Ben Glisan, corporate treasurer 2000 – November 2001
Glisan was the first Enron executive to go to prison after he pleaded guilty in 2003 to conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud.
He was released from home confinement in January 2007, making him the first Enron executive to be released.
He is the owner of Pinyon Advisors, a Texas-based financial services firm.
Rehashed from 2007.
John Arnold, trader 1995 – 2002
Arnold was one Enron employee who has gone on to stellar status. Having never been associated with any wrongdoing at his former firm, he left Enron in his early 20s after it collapsed in 2002.
But he had been paid an $8m bonus for his performance in 2001, and used the funds to set up Centaurus Advisors, a hedge fund specialising in energy products. Since its launch, Centaurus has returned at least 80% every year.
He is now a hedge fund star, and ranked number five on Fortune’s 40 under 40 list for 2011 with an estimated fortune of $4bn.
Last year, Arnold joined a list of 40 billionaires to sign up to the “Giving Pledge”, a drive by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates to get billionaires to donate the majority of their wealth to charity.
Private citizen. None of our business.
Greg Whalley, president and chief operating officer of Enron Wholesale Services August 2001 – January 2002
Whalley joined John Arnold at Centaurus. Last year, Whalley attended a Commodity Futures Trading Commission meeting on the Dodd Frank act on position limits rules for Centaurus, CFTC records show.
Nobody in this article was quoted. It says at the top that they “contacted those involved” so I wonder if ANYONE would talk to Financial News. It doesn’t appear to be the case; I could be wrong, but there was absolutely nothing here that isn’t already on the internet.
I am starved for a new perspective on Enron — and happy to contribute to it. But rehashing the same old junk over and over again is doing nothing to further the study of Enron, or help the people involved, or even educate the public.
I want more from my media.
Filed under Enron
‘A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth’. So said Mao Zedong, or Joseph Goebbels, depending upon your political or other persuasion. As the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Enron approaches, it would be difficult to escape the conclusion that the great lie that is the mainstream narrative on Enron’s collapse will indeed become the unassailable truth – Enron was a giant house of cards from top to bottom, the edifice held together only by a spider’s web of deceit and accounting fraud. The company was corrupt from boardroom to basement.
In the intervening ten years, much has changed, but the narrative has not. Many of Enron’s executives were sent to prison for their ‘wrongdoing’. Of those, several suffered more than one trial. Some eventually had their convictions overturned on appeal. One man remains behind bars to this day; Former CEO Jeff Skilling’s 24 years sentence dwarfed that handed out to any other executive, and he protests his innocence to this day from inside his prison in Colorado.
Enron had many victims. A lot of people lost their livelihoods, and much of their retirement provision. They would be right to feel angry and upset at the company’s demise. That there was fraud at Enron was undoubted, but that is a very different thing from saying that the entire company was rotten, or that the CEO should be criminally liable because his company failed.
What I find particularly sad though is that long after the statute of limitations has passed on criminal charges, few if any of the former executives who were threatened with indictment by the Enron Task Force if they dared to testify for the defence in an Enron trial will come out and tell what really happened. It is possible that a number of these guys are more than happy to talk about their experiences privately, but will never put their head above the public parapet because they know what it feels like to have the 400 pound gorilla that is the US Justice Department breathe down their necks. In that sense, who can possibly blame them.
The sadness, though, is that the conspiracy of silence ensures that the lie becomes the truth, and it may yet condemn Jeff Skilling, who is shortly to file a motion alleging gross prosecutorial misconduct, to many more years in prison. I’ve never met Jeff Skilling, but my sense is that if you cut him, he would have bled Enron. He and his company made some bad business decisions. That does not of itself make him a criminal.
Enron was a fantastic company whose ruin brought low an entire community. It surely deserves better than the current epitaph of widespread fraud and corruption. An accepted narrative can be difficult to shift, even when totally wrong. This is all very easy for me to say, of course, from the comfort of my home five thousand miles away. I’ve done my time now, but I have a lot of unfinished business with the UK Government and our hideous extradition laws which would shame a banana republic. We are few, but we are making progress, and there is now definitely light at the end of the tunnel with respect to law change.
The last ten years, including my time in ten different prisons on two continents, have taught me a lot about myself, and some of it wasn’t very pleasant. But if there’s one thing I’m sure about, it’s that just because you can’t do everything doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do something. Cara Ellison gets this. Tom Kirkendall at the Houston’s Clear Thinkers blog gets this. I am sure that privately there are many who would like to see Jeff Skilling out of prison right now, because his conviction was an affront to American justice. It’s not an impossible dream, but right now he surely needs people to fight his corner; people who could make a difference. People who could finally lift the lid on the McCarthyist witch-hunt that was the Enron Task Force. The intimidation of witnesses. The withholding of exculpatory evidence. The mob prosecution tactics that saw minnows being pressured to testify falsely against their superiors, and individuals threatened with lifetimes in prison if they didn’t agree to plead guilty.
My fervent hope is that the next few years may see the other side of the Enron story finally revealed, so that at least independent observers can make up their own minds on a fully informed basis, instead of being
force-fed a diet of populist propaganda by the mainstream media. I have enormously fond memories of my time in Houston, the circumstances of my being there notwithstanding. It’s a great City that deserves more than
constantly being linked with a company that is a by-word for fraud and corruption.
Filed under Uncategorized
It is painful to read some of the stupidity that people actually believe. Normally I stay away far away from it but for whatever reason, today I ventured out. It was a total monkeyfuck.
Some guy said that there were Enron papers in WTC1. I’ve been over this a thousand times. Let’s do a simple logic exercise.
Enron was not investigated until October 26. That is AFTER September 11. That means, for those who don’t understand this simple truth, that there were no “Enron investigation documents” (whatever those are) created until October, which comes AFTER September. Which means September 11 already happened.
I feel like I am explaining this to a three year old.
But this was the “exchange” if you can call it that:
He then filled my Twitter page with invective:
I replied a few times more, until realizing I was speaking to someone who probably likes to go outside and shout at cars:
And he continued with his crazy:
And that is why I don’t discuss conspiracy theories. Because no matter how much logic you try to shove down their throats, they will never get it. They always feel they have some special knowledge that trumps your knowledge. It is a futile game, and not very enjoyable.
Filed under Uncategorized
1. It is a curious thing that nobody else is discussing Jeff Skilling’s new appeal to the Supreme Court. Did the media miss it? Or is there some other reason they’re being quiet?
2. If Enron collapsed due to greed, how are other so-called greedy companies still in business?
3. If Jeff Skilling directed reserve accounts to be raided in order to make earnings – while at the same time hiding profits from wholesale – why did it never occur to him to steal from the wholesale earnings? Wouldn’t that have solved the problem?
Filed under Uncategorized
It is funny what you remember, the little bits of information that can last for years, seemingly without purpose. I had always remembered seeing the Enron collapse on television from Washington DC. But what I didn’t realize, until today, that it was the same day that Mike Spann, a CIA officer, was killed in Afghanistan. I remember that supremely well. I was at my boyfriend’s house and he was cooking dinner. I was lying on the sofa, still in the September 11 haze when you could not look away from the tv or you’d feel un-American. I remember hearing that a CIA officer had been found, and being shocked because I knew that the CIA was very media-shy. Why were we hearing about this?
I began to pay attention. I remember seeing the Enron story after the Mike Spann story. I remember the images of the blue towers, and I remember they showed Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. I remember feeling a weird sense of displacement. Was I in Houston? No, wait, I’m in Northern Virginia. So why was Enron on tv?
I can honestly say that from the first moment – from the first second I saw the Enron story on television on this day ten years ago – I thought it was total bullshit. I was prepared to be found wrong. But there was something about the way it was being reported that bothered me a great deal. I knew Enron. I knew that company like the back of my hand. I knew the people on television. And they were not criminals. Yet they were being portrayed that way, and there was no room for dissent in those reports. Not on that day. Not for a long time.
I remember walking away from the television and telling my boyfriend about Enron. I remember he was making spaghetti puttanesca, and I watched him chop garlic while I spoke. I remember feeling a knot in my tummy, a sense that something very bad was happening, over and above the mourning of the previous month and a half. A new level of badness had descended, just when we thought it could not get any worse.
I remember telling him about how it felt to walk inside the building. How it felt to talk to people who were so smart, so charming. How it felt to be part of that. And to see it collapse right in front of your eyes.
That was the beginning for me. The day I became radicalized. The day I became passionate about Enron. That very night I began my Right Thinking Girl blog. I wanted to talk about Michael Spann, but I also wanted to discuss Enron – a subject I was assured that nobody would care about. Every blogger in the world told me to quit writing about Enron, telling me I’d get more traffic if I just wrote about politics.
But I couldn’t quit. People do care. I do not care about traffic; I care about telling the truth about Enron. Today is a day of coincidences and beginning and endings. If I stand back far enough I can see the little marker of fate.
Filed under Uncategorized
The next morning, Thursday, the tiny branch office on Kirby Drive of the International Bank of Commerce issued $38 million in cashier’s checks to Ray Bowen. These would be retention bonuses to keep the traders and other high value employees on board. Bowen returned to Enron and handed out the checks. Most people ran for the exits, eager to deposit them before Enron went under.
For the average Enron worker, it must have been rather like the day before Christmas Eve, when half the people are gone and no work gets done. There actually was no work that Enron could transact. Nobody would touch Enron – no bank would extend credit, no counterpart wanted to transact with a company who couldn’t pay. Duke Energy stuck it out until the end – they didn’t stop trading with Enron until close of business the day before. On Thursday, the online trading business of Enron Metals Ltd., the metals trading arm of the company, was switched back on after shutting down Wednesday evening. “EnronOnline Metals is definitely up and running,” said an unnamed corporate officer to Reuters. (One can hear the desperation in that sentence.)
There was open talk of bankruptcy, but it had not quite happened yet. The day before, Wednesday, Jeff McMahon said that he would prefer to fix Enron without a bankruptcy filing, but was amenable to it if that was the only option. They hired Blackstone Group, which specialized in reorganizations, to act as advisor. The company had retained Weil Gotshal & Manges, which specialized in bankruptcies, as legal advisor. Enron and indeed the world buzzed that Enron would file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which meant that it would reorganize and stay it in business.
A much worse choice would be to file Chapter 7, under which its assets would be liquidated. But Enron’s attorneys dismissed that possibility, stating the chances of that were “minimal.” “More likely Enron starts out Chapter 11, reaches the conclusion that can’t be reorganized and so goes Chapter 7,” an attorney told Reuters.
PricewaterhouseCoopers was appointed administrator of Enron’s European holding company and several of its operating companies. The Securities and Exchange Commission planned to investigate the Enron situation “thoroughly but quickly,” Chairman Harvey Pitt told Reuters.
Standard & Poor’s, whose debt-rating arm cut its ratings on Enron bonds Wednesday, said it was removing Enron from its S&P 100 and S&P 500 stock indexes. ENE stock would close at $.36
Filed under Enron
Enron Ten Years Later, Part Two
Enron Bad Guys vs. Today’s Financial Fiends
Enron Ten Years On: The Collapse Of A Titan
Update
Sarbanes-Oxley & The Legacy of Enron
Update 2
Enron Whistleblower Talks To Fox 26 (The video of this is just so outrageously over the top. I recommend for that reason alone.)
Update 3
Former Employees Discuss Life After Enron
Update 4
Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2000 and Enron
Update 5
Enron Employees Look Back With A Mix of Feelings (Brief quote from Rick Causey)
Filed under Uncategorized
It really seemed impossible, when the coup-de-grace came on November 28, 2001. Major bond rating agencies downgraded Enron’s debt to junk bond status. That was bad enough but the downgrade also triggered several accelerated payments worth billions of dollars that Enron had no hope of paying.
Executives knew then that there was no hope for ever seeing Enron alive again. When Dynegy pulled the plug on the proposed merger, some were surprised because they couldn’t conceive of a world without Enron. But at least one person in the room told me that he felt it in his bones for days that it wasn’t going to work. “There was a cloud over us,” he said.
The deal had called for Dynegy to buy Enron for $9 billion in stock plus assumption of billions of dollars of debt. The downgrades required cash-strapped Enron to immediately repay $3.9 billion out of $13 billion in debt and triggered an escape clause that Dynegy had written into the merger agreement. Dynegy would let Enron sink, but it was going to exercise a right negotiated under the merger agreement to buy Enron’s lucrative natural gas pipeline business, the acquisition of which analysts said had been one of Dynegy’s strongest motivations to merge with Enron in the first place.
“Our first priority is to protect our shareholders and our financial position,” said Chuck Watson, chairman and chief executive of Dynegy. “We know when to say `no’ and this morning we say `no.’”
Enron’s energy trading business shut down for two and a half hours as nobody would touch Enron. After the downgrade announcement, traders walked off the floor.
With no access to credit and no savior swooping in for a last minute save, bankruptcy was the only option. Nobody would touch them. Ray Bowen knew there was a little bit of cash ($400 million) in its Citibank accounts which would be owed a great deal of money. He called the assistant treasurer and told her to move it right now to Goldman Sachs. Goldman left it there for a few hours then called back. “Get your money out of here,” the bankers said. “We don’t want Enron’s business.” Bowen tried some other banks, but nobody was willing to touch Enron’s cash. Finally a teensy regional bank agreed to take it.
Employees needed to be paid. Traders, executives. Enron for all practical purposes was gone. The ability to operate was gone for sure. Without cash, Enron was dead as a body without blood. It had some assets but by this point, everyone believed they were worthless, except for the pipelines. It was possible, a few optimistic souls believed, that Enron could re-organize around its pipelines. And if anyone was going to stick around for that, they had to be paid.
They would show up to work the next day.
Filed under Enron
On November 29, 1999, Enron launched EnronOnline, an electronic transaction platform that offered free, real-time pricing information for 2,100 commodities, including electricity, natural gas, coal, pulp and paper, clean air credits, bandwidth, weather and credit derivatives, petrochemicals and plastics, and oil and refined products.
Unlike other Internet commodity service providers, EnronOnline did not match buyers with sellers. Instead, commodity consumers and producers around the world were able to instantaneously conduct transactions directly with an Enron company as principal. EnronOnline was simply an extension of what occurred within the various Enron companies via the telephone on a daily basis. EnronOnline worked by matching itself with every potential buyer or seller, making money on every transaction.
EnronOnline ran on an Oracle database and WebLogic Java application servers that ran on Windows NT. Portions of the site took advantage of Macromedia shockwave, and transactions were secure using SSL encryption.
Efficiency gains made possible by dynamic pricing and trading were especially well suited to Enron’s online business because electronic trading could match the speed with which commodity pricing changed. Transactions that used to take up to three minutes to complete over the phone now took just a second or two.
Enron charged no commission and no subscription fee, an offer which led some analysts to forecast the extinction of traditional brokerages.
Though it didn’t last long enough to put traditional brokerages out of business, EnronOnline quickly made its presence known. It became the largest ecommerce website in the world. In just two years it bought and sold $880 billion worth of products, averaging 6,000 transactions a day worth an average $6 billion.
A particular element of symmetry: EnronOnline closed down for online trading on the morning of November 28, 2001, exactly two years after it went live, and only six months after it reached the one-millionth transaction milestone.
Filed under Enron
Jeff Skilling’s brother, Tom Skilling, a weatherman in Chicago, is profiled in NYT.
Filed under Uncategorized
CNBC reports:
On the eve of the tenth anniversary of Enron’s collapse, the energy giant’s former CEO, Jeff Skilling, is again asking the Supreme Court to grant him a new trial.
Skilling, who has served five years of his 24-year sentence for conspiracy, fraud and insider trading, won a preliminary victory last year when the high court ruled the key legal theory used to convict him was invalid, sending the case back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for review.
But Skilling’s hopes were dashed in April when the appeals court ruled the error was “harmless” and did not merit a new trial.
Now, in a 68-page petition filed today, Skilling’s attorneys say the appeals court decision makes a “mockery” of the Supreme Court decision, and the petition asks the high court to order a new trial.
At issue is the so-called “honest services theory,” which the Supreme Court narrowed in a series of decisions last year.
The theory, which had been widely used by prosecutors in white collar cases, said that it is a crime to withhold one’s “honest services” from an employer or shareholders.
The high court said the theory should only apply to employees who are guilty of theft, bribery or similar offenses. Because Skilling was not accused of stealing from Enron, the honest services theory could not be used to convict him.
The appeals court ruled the error was harmless, however, because the jury still could have convicted Skilling of fraud under alternative theories. Jurors in the 2006 trial were not required to specify what theory they used to reach their verdict.
In the new appeal to the Supreme Court, Skilling’s attorneys argue that under the law, it is not for the appeals court to determine whether the jury could have convicted Skilling without the discredited honest services theory. The petition says that in rejecting a new trial, the appeals court is improperly ignoring Skilling’s defense at trial.
Skilling, 58, crafted Enron’s business model. He rose to CEO in 2001, but abruptly resigned six months later — just three months before the company filed for bankruptcy in a massive accounting scandal.
He has consistently denied he committed any crimes.
Filed under Uncategorized
Big: iPhones destroy marriages!
Me: Don’t worry, that will never happen to us. I would never let you have a smartphone.
Filed under Uncategorized
This is the week of the collapse of Enron Corporation so there are a lot of pictures of Enron execs, most of them coming to and from the court house. One trend is to show them in handcuffs if at all possible. Earlier today, the Chron switched out a normal picture of Rex Shelby for this one:
I really hate this picture. It is frightening. Rex Shelby is looking down because he is about to head down some narrow steps, but it looks like he’s ashamed. He had nothing to be ashamed of. If you notice, the agents are also looking down as they approach the steps. Furthermore, I’ve heard from someone who would know that he was actually pleasantly surprised by the FBI agents who arrested him — I hear that they got along well. One of them tried to shield him from the cameras, but he had to step back as they approached the narrow steps — that is when one of the camera slugs, who were camping at the courthouse in those days, managed to grab a photo, I guess.
The purpose of the perp walk is to humiliate the accused and put an image in the minds of media consumers that he is guilty. He’s in handcuffs, so he must be guilty.
The worst one in my opinion is a tie between Ben Glisan and Andy Fastow. Both were wearing chains. But look at this picture of Andy Fastow:
Seriously? Chains? Why? The FBI had taken his belt and his necktie in this photo, then bound his hands. It is painful to look at. His face is so sweet in this picture too – he looks daunted by what has happened to him.
They put Ben Glisan in chains too, but interestingly when he was arrested, they allowed him to cover his hands with his jacket (notice he is without a tie and belt too):
It is disgusting. None of the Enron executives were violent. None protested when they were arrested. And they were treated like violent murderers. When I see images like this, I just think the media beast is being fed. Absolutely must show them in handcuffs or else the public might get the wrong idea, like that maybe they’re innocent. Can’t have that!
Filed under Uncategorized
|
