In an article on Yahoo! News today, they mentioned that a video of an Enron staff meeting has surfaced. Apparently, former Enron CEO Kenneth L. Lay read feedback from employees to their then-CEO. Here is one of the questions:
``I would like to know if you are on crack. If so that would explain a lot, if
not you may want to start because it’s going to be a long time before we trust
you again.’’
3 responses so far ↓
1 Elliott // Feb 4, 2002 at 3:17 pm
Speaking from California, where a disasterous and poorly-planned deregulation of the electricity utility played into the hands of Enron’s business strategy, leading to blackouts and bankruptcies, I have to say it’s hard to find much sympathy for this company. Although they put themselves in a position to charge nine hundred times the going rate for electircity, they are bankrupt. Go figure.
2 Scotty The Body // Feb 5, 2002 at 3:37 pm
That’s a really good point, Elliott. I have a friend who worked for Enron’s bandwidth department. He was flown around the country (and maybe even the world) to build out this state-of-the-art network. He was paid a 100% bonus. The problem was, of course, that they didn’t have any customers on this network to pay for all of these switches, routers, fiber optic runs, data centers and, oh ya, 100% bonuses.
3 Elliott // Feb 11, 2002 at 3:39 am
There’s a great article in today’s New York Times about Enron that puts some of the events in the recent history of the company in a timeline, as well as portrays Enron as a house of cards.When the electricity crisis (The Electricity Crisis) hit California, I was appalled at the California law that prevented the state’s power grid controllers from buing long-term contracts. It was a bone-headed piece of legislation. In some sense it seemed like the state got what it deserved. Now, looking at the sham that was Enron, I think there was as much greedy hustle from that company as clueless policy from this state.Mr. Skilling, the then Enron CEO, made a joke in June about the difference between California and the Titanic, the punchline being that when the Titanic went down, the lights were on. Well, the other shoe has dropped, eh, Mr. Skilling?I think it is worth remembering, in this time of ‘patriotism’, that this is the kind of feel-good capitalism that we are killing people to protect.
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