Get a Rope

Do we really need to wait until September to find out how many years the Enron Boys will have to serve in prison? Normally I am a bleeding heart when it comes to long prison terms but an appropriate sentence for Ken Lay with his million dollar smile and Jeffrey Skilling with his cold viper eyes might be a trillion years. It's about time a symbol for the shame of modern American capitalism be served up. It looks like these two guys will do the time for all the other corporate titans and financial con men that got away.
Justice works in strange ways. Perhaps this one time we need to amplify the point made by the swift and sure conviction in that Texas courtroom. Scapegoating will never be enough to smooth the public feathers and public hanging was outlawed a long time ago. If you can not do the time do not do the crime still rings true today. Just because you commit a crime while wearing a suit doesn't change the amount of time you must spend in prison if you get caught. These two men didn't rob a 7-11 with a gun, they didn't rape your daughter or kill someone, they robed the general public with a pen and a computer. Maybe a trillion years is a little too harsh but it sure needs to be longer than the slap on the wrist that Martha Sterwert got, she never even stopped baking cookies!
It all boils down to greed and all of us have a little if not a lot of that in our souls even if we want to admit it or not. I do not claim to know the souls of Lay or Skilling but I sure know greed was in there somewhere. They both had more money than most people could ever imagine but they still wanted more so they ate and ate till they ate the goose that layed the golden egg.
Enron has vanished as though it was never there. The conviction last month and the announcement of the prison terms in September will be closure for a lot of people who were victimized by the Enron Boys. Those victims will never get their money back so it's best they try and find a little humor in the Enron demise and get on with life. The "I GOT LAY'D BY ENRON" t shirts that can be found selling on E Bay may be the only laugh they will ever be able to muster but at least there will be closure of the Enron nightmare when the judge sentences Kennrth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling in September.