Justice, Sweet and Rare

I live in California, a state known for oranges, show business, and paying about 5 times what we should for our electricity, because of a very bad contract we negotiated under pressure. We pay too much for electricity and were suckered into trashing our effective but unpopular governor in favor of an Austrian body-builder and "actor" who is now even more unpopular but also ineffective. For a state as phallicly shaped as this, we certainly seem to be on the receiving end.

Ken Lay and Jeffery Skilling, the former heads on Enron and probably co-authors of our country's current energy policy, have been convicted of crimes so basic and obvious that even a jury system was able to recognize them. As of this morning they are facing years in prison, convicted of 6 out of 6 counts (Lay) and 19 out of 28 counts (Skilling). Sentencing will be handed down in September, giving us all three months of air conditioning bills to consider what has been done to us. This is also three months in which either man can flee the country to live on one of their myriad islands or foreign holdings. Assuming they don't only exist on paper.

I don't wish them well.

As much fun as it would be to see them sodomized in prison, this was a business crime, based on money alone. The just thing would be a redistribution of wealth - perhaps their personal fortunes could be stripped from them and paid out to the employees whose 401Ks were drained away while they slept. Or paid into California's coffers, because our current financial problems are a direct result of Enron's shakedown. As long as they are made penniless and someone else benefits, I'm satisfied.

What should make you really angry at these guys is their incompetence. The Oil Companies are doing the exact same shortage/price gouge game, have been doing it for years, but their stockholders are benefiting and reaping the rewards. How difficult can it be to turn a real profit from a monopoly? Idiots!

Well, no matter what happens they'll be pardoned in two years anyway, so it's a moot point.