Live Life Team
This book takes us into the world of corporate greed and gives us a glimpse into the personalities of the people who led a multi-billion dollar corporation to financial ruin. It is a movie about greed at its most base level and how the leaders of this corporation, people making hundreds of thousands a year, had no hesitation to fleece their employees out of their life savings, all in the name of maintaining their own standard of living while their world was crumbling around them.
For the uninitiated, Enron was one of the largest energy corporations in the United States. People made it their life’s work to toil in the “real jobs” – coming to work each day for a decent, though not overly generous, wage – all the while knowing that when the time came for their retirement, they would be well looked after since the value of their retirement savings would sustain them. But that was before the corporate bigwigs saw the company taking a turn for the worse. They needed an infusion of capital and decided that the best place to get it would be from their own employees. So they talked them into investing their entire 401K portfolios in company stock, and then they slid a little “clause” into the agreement that would prevent those same employees from bailing out of those investments when things began looking bad.
The end result is that while many of the corporate executives went to jail, others got away scot-free. The corporation went under, and the employees – the little people with no say and no ability to divest themselves of those bad investments before it was too late – lost everything they had worked all their lives for.
A tragic, though true, film that shows us the tragically ugly side of unbridled greed.
