in is not too strong a term. Tom Brokaw, on NBC Nightly news, the week of February 4, featured interviews with Enron employees, a Oregon couple, who would now have to sell at least part of their farm which had been in the family for generations, just to survive. Their retirement money, as well as that of many others, some of whom testified in Washington, was now gone. he reason is not merely the shenanigans of the corporation with its auditors, but the untruths told faithful employees to make them feel that they were not on a Titanic-like sinking ship.
NEWSWEEK, among other general interest magazines, spent pages covering the executive failures at Enron. More than Enron employees and shareholders suffered at the collapse of the energy giant, Enron, as is made clear in two NEWSWEEK articles, in the February 18,2002 issue, by Evan Thomas and Daniel McGinn (pp. 24-32). Thomas' article makes it clear that the major fault lay with the top executives, and both their greed in amassing personal fortunes, and their deceit in not letting employees and other interested parties (including financial institutions and investors) know about the company's dire financial straits.
The excuse offered before Congressional investigators by former CEO Jeff Skilling was not even believed by his mother. "Incredulity is a polite word to describe the reaction toa.Skilling, who swore last week at a congressional hearing that his company's bookkeeping trickery had caught him by surprise" (Thomas 24)
According to the Thomas article, "There was the pathos of seeing those self-appointed visionaries of the new millennium- who apparently believed that they could rise above the old rules- hauled into that hoariest of rituals, the congressional inquisition." (Thomas 24) It is still unclear whether the courts will consider the actions of Enron's top executives as civil or criminal fraud. It is obvious that these executives spread the wealth among f...