Great piece Andrew. Looks like the "invisible hand" has been slapped, but good.

I take exception to the tagline (which appears on the salon.com cover page but not in the story): "It isn't just Enron's Lay and Skilling who are guilty -- the corrupt, crony-ridden Bush administration that encouraged rogues like them is too." If you're going to pin blame on an administration, you can't ignore the SEC during the late 90s, when Clinton, not Bush, was in office. The market only went in one direction - up - right? Why mess with that? That was the prevailing attitude of the so-called regulators at the SEC.

It ain't over till it's over.

Look for appeals and delays and sideroom deals. I have trouble believe these guys will actually be in prison. Remember that they were just opportunists of de-regulation spawned by the right wing

cordelia525 is right. Enron's misdeeds took place during the Clinton administration. Paul Krugman, the king of fatuousness who excoriates Bush at every opportunity (and doesn't let the truth get in the way of making a good point), actually wrote a puff piece about Enron for Fortune magazine and was on the Enron board of advisers, but then lied about it in his NYT column.

The tagline on this article just proves how silly Salon and its readers are: everything's Bush's fault, even when it wasn't.

Wealthy slease like Lay and Skillings will buy their way out somehow. Worst case will be a short stay at club Fed, and then a Bush pardon.

Enron's misdeeds were made possible by the Republican controlled congress who freed Enron of all oversite over the objections of Clinton. Selective memory is indeed a wonderful thing.

Please, Denfield, that response is so pathetic it barely deserves a retort, but here goes anyway: The SEC is part of the executive branch, which means it was under control of the Clinton administration, not Congress. And remember, Ken Lay went to Robert Rubin, Clinton's Treasury Secretary, to try to get Citicorp to extend financing. It was later in 2001, when everything was going to hell, that Enron went to the Bush administration for help and was turned down!

Cite me a single news source that had Clinton objectiing to anything Enron was doing and I'll believe you. Otherwise, it's just a pathetic statement from someone who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Wasn't almost all of Enron's chicanery done during the Clinton presidency?

I'm not suggesting that Clinton was to blame. I just found the sub-headline to be quite a stretch. I mean, I despise George Bush. I think he's a war criminal and entirely deserving of impeachment but there are enough things he's actually guilty of that there's no need to make up extra.

Also, when you overstate or just plain mistate like that it makes it a lot easier for people to dismiss valid criticisms.

... that anything you claim is true and make believers of us all, anonymous. Your old school Internet attack dog tactics are a little 2001, don't you think? Ranting and raving doesn't make your case, it just makes you look like a Republican stooge.

Yeah, anonymous asswipe, it's clinton's fault that the texass energy demons devoured billions of dollars, gang-raped the retirements of tens of thousands of workers, and gamed the Kahleephonya energy "crisis" in 2001. widdle geogie flew on the Enron private fucking jet during his losing campaign of 2000. Don't try to spin this, dickheads. It's all republikan corruption, every last steaming turd of it.

I suppose Andrew Leonard will say he's not responsible for the pathetically misleading tagline that blames Bush for the Enron scandals...and maybe that's true. But really...how ridiculous is it to try to blame Bush for the corruption that went on for years and years while Clinton was president? If an editor hung a tagline like that on one of my articles, and I didn't agree with it, I'd call him up and tell him to knock it off.

Oh wait...maybe Leonard doesn't think it's a bad tagline.

Either way, I don't blame Clinton for the problem either...not directly...it's just the recent American culture.

The real problem here is that most Salon readers have gulped down so much pink Kool-Aid, they won't recognize the truth.

MoodyRiver

Can we call a truce to the pissing contest? No one said the fraud that took place is all Clinton's fault. We just called Salon.com to task for its blatant one-sided reporting. And for the record:

The fact of the matter is that there was little if any SEC enforcement when we now know that some of the largest publicly-traded companies were cooking the books. And it's not like you'd even need an accounting degree to figure this out. Worldcom earnings were increasing (like magic!) while its competitors were struggling with losses, and Worldcom's consumer rates were lower than their competitors. Any idiot could have figured that one out, or at least flagged Worldcom for audit. As for Enron, all it took is cursory probing into the now notorious partnerships to figure out that the company's earnings had little integrity.

By contrast, FERC under Bush was more of a joke than under Clinton. Not that any of you Clinton defenders know FERC from a hole in the wall.

For all you Liberal whiners out there, you don't have a leg to stand on. Almost all of the funny business with Enron took place under the Clinton admin, and it was Clinton officials who tried to bail them out. Here's from THE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER (You know, the notoriously Bush-friendly Seattle Post-Intelligencer! Ha!), January 24, 2002, p.. B4, by Ted Van Dyk.

"There is no evidence to date that President Bush or members of his Cabinet said anything but no to Enron's SOS calls when flooding began in that financial Titanic's engine room. At the same time, such a respected figure as former Democratic Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin was urging his ex-Treasury colleagues to help Enron when he saw that Citicorp, where he is a senior executive, might lose up to $l billion if Enron went down."