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  Laying Enron to Rest
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ContributorArmyDem 
Last EditedArmyDem  May 31, 2006 11:17pm
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News DateTuesday, June 6, 2006 05:00:00 AM UTC0:0
DescriptionConvicted felons Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling may be trading pinstripes for prison stripes. These were 'the smartest guys in the room'?

By Allan Sloan
Newsweek

June 5, 2006 issue - Enron was the company that was going to change the world. And now, by God, it has—but not in the way that it had in mind. Once, Enron was the quintessential New Economy company, seeming to churn out ever-growing profits from mundane businesses like natural-gas pipelines and water and electric-generating plants as ephemeral dot-coms crashed and burned. Enron was going to replace sclerotic government regulation with Adam Smith's invisible (and efficient) hand of the free market. Everyone was going to save money, and Enron's shareholders were going to get rich.

Instead, Enron imploded five years ago, turning almost overnight from No. 7 in the Fortune 500 into a bankrupt hulk. This shocking collapse transformed Enron from deregulation's poster child into a symbol of corporate dysfunction. Instead of making the world safe for capitalism, the Enron Era set off a corporate scandal wave that leapt the species barrier, morphing from

a business-pages-only story into a national psychodrama. We saw crying Enron employees whose jobs and life savings both vaporized when Enron melted down, taking their 401(k) accounts with it. Then there were Enron's close ties to George W. Bush, our first M.B.A. president, which lent a decidedly political aspect to the scandal. Enron became grist for the 24-hour news cycle, and was seared into the national consciousness like no other business story since the Great Depression.
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