Some perspective on the Enron debacle from Alistair Cooke:
The American public is as stunned as the British people would have been in 1912 to learn that the captain of the Titanic, having been told by the ship’s architect – as he was – that the ship would go down in two hours, summoned his exec officer, told him to round up the officers and prepare to abandon ship as silently as possible, ordering two or three lifeboats to be slipped down on the starboard side. Meanwhile the purser was instructed to open the ship’s strong box, take all the currency and the jewels of the passengers and join the fleeing officers.
The chief steward was told to have his men patrol the ship and assure the passengers that everything was fine, no danger and go back to sleep. The stewards might then join the rest of the crew in the departing lifeboats and pull away.
I have to confess that I didn’t realize Mr. Cooke was still with us, but I think his observation here is spot on. What is really driving this whole public outrage is not so much the worried amazement that a company seemingly that big could tank so quickly, but that all the top execs seem to have gleefully walked away with boatloads of money, relying on their inside information that things were going south, while the average Enron worker, lied to by their own management and locked into pension plans that didn’t let them act even at the last extremity, ended up taking it in the shorts.
(Via Trance Gemini)