[Mr 5 0]

Dark_5.0:

Thanks for the clarification regarding California energy policies.

I'm aware that CA state government is dominated by enviromental whackos who believe in fantasies such as windmill power and have stopped the building of power plants for a decade or more; then they regulate, tax and harrass energy-producing companies and blame them when the price goes up and/or shortages develop.

Typical liberal politicians who blather about how much they looooooove the 'little guy' and then go tax him to death and screw around with vital resources that end up costing him more - while they blame everyone but themselves.

Gov. Davis is a loon (in my opinion) and CA is getting a well-deserved reputation as a unfriendly state for business and most anyone else. Mild climates don't mean much when you can't afford to live there, not to mention the out-of-control Mexican illegal immigration problem that is slowly but surely reclaiming CA as a Mexican province through osmosis.

Enron management lied to investors and the public.
They tried hard to manipulate politicians (with some success in the Clinton administration) and they screwed the public, employees and investors all the way around. Not the first big corporation to do this, nor will they be the last, but the blatant financial deceptions Kenneth Lay and the upper management of Enron engaged in needs to be punished as an example to other CEO's who think it might be 'worth it' to play this game. After all, Lay came out of the collapse with millions.

I suspect Enron officials may not be going to jail any time soon as many of the things they did violated SEC rules, not criminal law. However, since the spotlight on on them now, they may be held accountable in some way; at least financially.

I don't get upset when a corporation's investors lose money and employees lose jobs due to corporate mismanagement, as Enron did, as this is common in the business world. Investing is risky and you have to know when to pull out - or not.
Not every business succeeds all the time and some huge corporations have folded over the years. It happens.

I do get upset when said corporation manipulates and lies about it's true financial stste and it's 'independent' auditors are accomplices in the fraud on the public and the investors, as well as the employees who would have bailed out both their 401(k) Enron stocks as well as the company itself had they known the truth, which Kenneth Lay and Enron management made certain they did not.

As I stated in a prior post; Enron may or may not have screwed California citizens but they screwed a lot of others - especially investors - and although they may or may not have committed criminally actionable fraud, Lay and the senior Enron management team that knew and aided the fraud (along with Arthur Anderson executives who went along with it) should be prosecuted wherever possible and the huge profits some of these guys walked off with should be eaten up in fines and other financial sanctions via the SEC, IRS, etc.

Corporate wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise, should not be rewarded. The stock market is vital to our economy and this kind of fraud by a corporation (although not a major one in terms of size or number of employees) should be punished and held up as a bad example of executive mismanagement gone into the abyss of criminal fraud in pursuit of profit.

I'm a capitalist and a true believer in the capitalist system, despite abberations such as Enron. Marxism doesn't make it for me and socialist governments always collapse from their own weight but the capitalist game has to played with at least a modicum of fairness and honesty.
Politicians will always be part-time lackeys of big corporations as well as labor unions and other 'special interests'. Everyone has a 'special interest'. Fine. We'll survive, but when corporations engage in outright fraud, the whole system begins to wobble a bit, as investors - current and future - can no longer trust corporate reports, P&L sheets, etc and will hesitate to invest at all. Bad news.

It's (in part) the success of big corporations that employ hundreds of thousands of people that keep the economy growing, which benefits us all.
Debacles like the one at Enron hurt people and shake confidence in business. This is why I give a rap about the demise of a company I hardly knew about before a few weeks ago and why I hope the top executives at Enron don't wiggle out of this mess with a slap on the wrist.

Remains to be seen but meanwhile, let's hope CA gets it's energy policies back in the real world and stops playing political games with vital resources just to fulfill some enviromental Shangri-La fantasies held dear by liberal politicians and 'enviromental activists' who produce no energy at all, not counting their windy diatribes about 'saving' the earth, while citizens watch the lights go out and the electric bills climb. Get real, California.