yeager

So, Scott Yeager is asking the Supreme Court to not permit the government from retrying him on Enron fraud, since the first trial was deadlocked on multiple counts (fraud, money laundering, insider trading, etc. etc. etc).

I respect Justice Breyer and, in the interest of protecting civil liberties, I think his position is valid. The problem with protecting civil liberties, is that it protects both the innocent and the snakes.

Yeager cashed in $54 million of Enron stock and options before bailing. He was at the top of the organization, and, if this wasn't insider trading and fraud, he was a manager completely out-of-touch.

Maybe I'm naive, but I thought the philosophy of work is that you get rewarded for bringing your organization success. Yeager was fabulously enriched and his justification for keeping the loot is that he had no idea that things were going to utterly crash and burn.

What am I missing? Good thing this attitude is nowhere to be found nowadays - we have sure learned our lessons!

Here's the classic 'Enron Communications' photo (i.e. the predecessor of Enron Broadband Services) in the very early days, when this group was most of the entire company, and we were all going to be millionaires. Some of the people in this photo actually did.

That's Yeager in the middle of the Big Three (and me, two heads away, in the back row, with the gargoyle on my shoulder).