This kinda shit really pisses me off.

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Lawmakers heaped criticism Wednesday on executives of collapsed Enron Corp., saying they enriched themselves through inside trading and slick financial gimmicks while running the energy-trading company into the ground.

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Enron's swift descent into federal bankruptcy court left countless investors burned and thousands of employees out of work and with decimated retirement savings.

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Enron executives were "just having too much fun," he said. They cashed out more than $1 billion in company stock while ordinary employees were barred from selling it from their Enron-heavy 401(k) accounts as share prices plunged, Baker said.

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Amid the company's strife, nearly 600 employees deemed critical to its operations received more than $100 million in bonuses last month as Enron faced a merger that unraveled and then bankruptcy.

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It makes one wonder what other chicanery is going on in major corporations that we don't know about yet. (Yeah, I know this kind of stuff is really nothing new.)

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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

Contemptible bastiches... If true, this is grounds for a GD stoning (and not in the Bob Dylan "Rainy Day Women" sense).

But in an age in which employees are laid off via E-mail it wouldn't be that surprising.

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"You'll burn for this. Burn in jail!"

Oh yeah, we learned all about this in the 80s. Gee, why do all these companies with well-connected executives keep failing? LIMITED LIABILITY MEANS NEVER FAILING. (Especially if you're financed with tax-backed "loans.") Gee, why are these sons of Washington big-shots so stupid? STUPID LIKE BARNUM.

Ahhh, remember land-flipping?

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What others say about boorite!

Um, no. What was that?

What really irks me about this is that the upper executives are all walking away from this failure as millionaires. I thought the idea of capitalism is that hard work and success gets rewarded. That's what the pundits keep telling us anyway. I think every Enron executive who was given a huge bonus or sold millions of dollars worth of shares right before bankruptcy was declared should have their assets frozen and they sould be prosecuted for fraud. They ran the company into the ground and should not be extravagantly rewarded for doing so. It's a sham.

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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

I heard about this early last week when the merger fell apart , and it became obvious Enron was going to be filing for bankruptcy.

Its a pretty damning inditement of how major business works. The attempts of the late 90's at team building , and creating a sense of company loyalty was , and still is , a total sham. The only people who buy it are , unfortunately , the ones who end up in the situation you just explained.

Management see this coming. Inevitably , theyve already sold their stock , cashed in their options , and when the company goes tits up , theyll be heading the line of creditors looking for their guaranteed pay-offs from the job.

And because theyve got their options cashed , etc etc , they can afford to hire the decent attorneys to get their pay-offs before the average pleb on the ground floor who worked to build the company.

Its enough to make you want to be a communist.

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"Life Sucks, Then you Die. The bit inbetween isnt very funny either"

I heard about this early last week when the merger fell apart , and it became obvious Enron was going to be filing for bankruptcy.

Its a pretty damning inditement of how major business works. The attempts of the late 90's at team building , and creating a sense of company loyalty was , and still is , a total sham. The only people who buy it are , unfortunately , the ones who end up in the situation you just explained.

Management see this coming. Inevitably , theyve already sold their stock , cashed in their options , and when the company goes tits up , theyll be heading the line of creditors looking for their guaranteed pay-offs from the job.

And because theyve got their options cashed , etc etc , they can afford to hire the decent attorneys to get their pay-offs before the average pleb on the ground floor who worked to build the company.

Its enough to make you want to be a communist.

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"Life Sucks, Then you Die. The bit inbetween isnt very funny either"

They'll stone you when you're riding in your car.

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It's not just bankruptcy either...

Board of directors fucks up, take too much cream off the top, introduces stupid ideas, fucks up on the stockmarket... oh dear, we're not making as big a profit as last year! What should we do? Penalise the mongrels who caused the problem in the first place? Nah, how about this instead: sack a shitload of hardworking employees who never did anything wrong, dump their workload on their few remaining coworkers (making them insanely overworked in the process), and then give the guys who thought up this brilliant plan a big bonus for being so clever.

Cunts.

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This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

As much as it pisses everyone else off, you should see what it's like here. Enron was a huge backer of tons of things in Houston. The new baseball stadium, several other multi-million dollar facilities, being the backers behind almost all of the charity events. They pumped a lot of money into Houston and the community.

I have a lot of friends who worked for Enron. It WAS a great place to work as far as salary, job happiness, fast promotions, but as the old saying goes "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

Once it was found out that the execs were able to dump all of their shares of stock, but the employees were locked into their 401k's all hell broke loose. The current CEO and the EX-ceo just a month ago, dumped about 30 million each of their own personal stock. I immediately went "insider trading."

The funnier part, in September, the ex-ceo, Jeff Skelling made this big production about how he was not going to take his severance package that was worth several billion dollars, so that the employees could benefit more from it. The irony of that statement now is striking a lot of people.

For Houston, Enron's demise is a horrid thing. The ripple affect alone on businesses and charities is already happening. Enron was responsible for helping rebuild our decrepit downtown area into a swanky place to be. Enron employees are being told NOT to put Enron as their last place of work on their resumes, because the bitterness here against them, might cause them to not find a job.

Of all the billions these higher ups got, the employees themselves only got $4,500 in severance. And they wonder why the Police Department surrounded the building the day everyone was laid off.

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Women are fisher's of men because we all know.... The small ones you throw back. The medium ones you eat. The large ones you mount.

Wheeee...

The poor old workers get fucked up the arse, while the incompetent and amoral execs walk away with millions.

Change the record, God - this one's scratched.

Incidentally, those motherfucking execs dumping their stock would have greatly devalued it, meaning that the remaining bits of the company would have been worth much less when liquidated, and also the frozen stock owned by the honest workers ended up being worth fuck all.

Why the hell isn't shit like this illegal in either of our countries?

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This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

Um, no. What was that?

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Part and parcel of the great S&L crash. Basically you and I get together and inflate the value of land by false appraisals and bogus buying and selling to each other, and then we take out a huge federally-guaranteed mortgage, default on it, and run off with the money.

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What others say about boorite!

Um, no. What was that?

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Part and parcel of the great S&L crash. Basically you and I get together and inflate the value of land by false appraisals and bogus buying and selling to each other, and then we take out a huge federally-guaranteed mortgage, default on it, and run off with the money.

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OK, I have heard of that scheme. I didn't know what is was called. Yeah, land flipping sounds like the Little League version of the kind of fraud that many corporate execs pull off. Of course, they all pale next to the global Ponzi scheme that is the stock market...

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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

quote:

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Incidentally, those motherfucking execs dumping their stock would have greatly devalued it, meaning that the remaining bits of the company would have been worth much less when liquidated, and also the frozen stock owned by the honest workers ended up being worth fuck all.

Why the hell isn't shit like this illegal in either of our countries?

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Yep...the other thing is that the 401 was rigged that employees COULDN'T Sell their stock..which was of course all vested in Enron. They were blocked from making any changes while watching the price drop from $87 last year at this time..to the low of $0.36. All the folks who's retirement was locked up into it is poof gone.

And the execs will get away with it, the legal beagles will make sure of that. I just hope the securities investigation nails them on fraud and insider trading.

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Women are fisher's of men because we all know.... The small ones you throw back. The medium ones you eat. The large ones you mount.