Enron again

Andrew Fastow, once CFO at Enron, got out of stir this week. He’s entered a halfway house in his home town & scene of his crimes, Houston.

Fastow was behind Enron’s complex financial shell games, which resulted in the collapse of the company (once the seventh largest in the US) & the ruin of tens of thousands of employees & investors. There’s no question about that, & he was convicted of massive fraud, but because he cut a deal with prosecutors & ratted out his fellow executive fraudsters Kenneth Lay (CEO) & Jeffrey Skilling (president), he got a mere six years at Club Fed.

He’s now in a halfway house that’s seen a couple other Enron ex-cons, & apparently might (like others) be able to serve the last of his time in “home confinement”. Picture, if you will, the sentence your average embezzler would get & imagine that person getting the option of home confinement.

I have no words to express my contempt for Fastow & his crooked corporate cronies. I’m also disgusted that we the people learned nothing from the Enron incident & sailed head on into the economic meltdown of the past few years.

& Congress? Congress learned to label their largest political supporters “too big to fail” & to think it a much better investment to bail out the corporations so designated to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, but cut back or out social programs that support healthcare, housing, education & pensions to the mass of working & middle class Americans.