Please explain: How Madoff gets 150 years and ENRON fuckers get a slap on the wrist.

[devilgrrl]

How does that work? ENRON fucked people over too but they'll be out of jail in a few years to be free to rook people again - and they will!

[ingac70]

1. More high profile/ rich people....

scammed by Madoff.

[Junkdrawer]

4. Bingo. n/t

[AngryOldDem]

8. Yep.

Plus, after Enron, the public would not stand for one more slap on the wrist.

[TransitJohn]

11. Agree

That's it totally.

[glowing]

2. Its all about the depth of your theft and pockets. No one from BoA, Chase,

Goldman Sachs.. etc have faced anything but more money and corp. perks.

[rurallib]

3. Madoff didn't pay off the right people - like Kenny-boy did Bush.

[ixion]

7. my thought as well

the 'right' people didn't get their checks...

[baldguy]

18. bingo

[notadmblnd]

5. bush isn't pretzledent anymore

[rcrush]

6. Madoff is a fall guy

He didnt steal that 60 billion all by himself. He'll have a 'heart attack' in prison shortly

[Democracyinkind]

9. ENRON screwed THE PEOPLE, Maddoff screwed some RICH and made others RICHER

Madoff fell in order to appease the rich suckers who came to late into his scheme and didn't profit.

Enron didn't make allot of rich enemies - rather many rich friends.

[GodlessBiker]

10. Skilling got 24 years. For a man of his age, that's not chump change.

And, let's face it, Madoff will not be serving 150 years.

[el_bryanto]

12. I think it has to do with the actual criminality

I'm not defending the Enron Guys but they seem to have thought their scheme was actually working. That's different from Madoff who was out and out stealing.

Bryant

[Hannah Bell]

30. "seem to have thought their scheme was actually working" - to line their pockets.

[Catherine Vincent]

13. I think the 150 years is a warning to others out there that's even thinking about what Madoff did

:shrug:

[JVS]

14. Didn't the head of Enron die shortly before some kind of trial?

[4lbs]

15. You also have to look at the scale of the "ripoff".

Madoff was also ordered to "give back" the $170 billion.

That's right --> $170 BILLION <--.

I don't know if Enron's 'ripoff' amounted to much more than $30 billion, even though the number of people affected was probably a thousand times larger (at least everyone in California who paid double or triple higher energy rates in 2000 because of it).

Think about it this way. Take the dollar value of the scandal, applied in some proportion to the number of people involved in knowlingly perpetrating it.

So, Madoff and just one or two other persons get 170 years because of $170 billion scandal. Madoff gets 150 because he was the mastermind, and the others get 20 years split among them.

Now, Enron, $30 billion, means thirty years, divided by the number of people who engineered it. That's 5 or 6 people who had an equal hand, so that's 5 or 6 years per person.

[scheming daemons]

16. Enron fuckers had a friend in the White House

....Madoff doesn't.


:shrug:

[Rex]

17. Well I'm SURE ENRON had nothing to do with the CEO knowing certain people.

And besides, ENRON mostly hurt working class families. That has always been okay with our gummit, the other guy pissed off rich and powerful people.

Same as why Rush ain't rotting in jail charged with a non-violent drug offense, some people are rich and above the law - then there are us, the working stiffs.

We poor people get crucified by the state because rich people like Rush are not expected by the 'people in charge' to be moral or ethical.

[Bicoastal]

19. How about a SERIOUS response for a change?

I'm no legal expert, but my feeling is that in the case of Enron, there was a lot of guilt to go around and no one person was convicted of enough wrongdoing to get a lifetime sentence. Between Lay, Skilling, Andy Fastow, the fine folks at Arthur Andersen LLP, etc., the company committed an staggering amount of fraud, but judges are required to consider each person's illegal actions separately in a multi-person crime such as that one. Nobody, not even the ringleader, could be said to have acted alone.

Madoff, on the other hand? His entry in Wikipedia says he committed "the largest investor fraud ever committed by a single person." Bernie committed his crimes himself, more or less, in his scam, although the Feds still suspect that his wife and others may have been involved on a lower level.

But Enron and Madoff are two seperate animals--and I consider what Bernie did to be MUCH worse.

[HughBeaumont]

27. Someone once said "There's never just one cockroach".

Unless you're part of a criminal Republican government scheme that involves the defense industry, you cannot commit a 50 billion fraud scheme and not have someone either know or sweep it under the rug.

I think this was a sentencing based on massive egg-on-their-face guilt by our good ol' SEC, who did nothing with the testimonies of Madoff whistleblowers for nearly a decade.

[WeDidIt]

20. Because the laws regarding this sort of thing changed after Enron

Prior to Enron, officers of a company could not be held criminally liable for fake reporting and teh company itself was always liable in a civil sense.

[IdaBriggs]

21. Better lawyers. nt

[Political Heretic]

22. Madoff screwed the wrong people -- rich people.

[spanone]

23. because that was the bu$h* dept of justice

[tridim]

24. No kidding, Enron destroyed an entire state (among other things)

Madoff destroyed rich people with the help of Bush's SEC.

[Javaman]

25. it works like this...

if you screw dems you get a slap on the wrist and allowed to vanish before sentancing. If you screw repukes you get your ass handed to you.

[Hekate]

26. In my dreams, the Enron case gets revisited... nt

[HamdenRice]

28. Very different offenses. Enron was securities violations. Madoff was outright theft.

I realize it's kind of hard to understand the difference, but basically, the offenses were of different kinds.

When I speak of Enron's offenses, I'm not talking about how they screwed California energy consumers (which thanks to Bush was largely legal), but what brought them down -- namely, a series of violations of the securities laws.

Under the Securities Act, it's not illegal to do lots of things that the average person might think is illegal; but what the Securities Act focuses on, is that the company must truthfully tell the public what its doing in a document filed with the SEC and released to the public called a "prospectus" and "registration statement."

This leads to a certain amount of hilarity when sleazy companies conform to the Securities Act and explain all the awful shit they are doing. That's legal. If you buy their shares you're an idiot. But the Securities laws are not designed to prevent idiots from buying shares of sleazy companies; they are designed to ensure that idiots who buy shares from sleazy companies know that the company is sleazy.

Enron failed to truthfully explain what it was doing. It had a plausible explanation that what it was doing was not outright theft, but constituted less than truthful explanation of fantastically stupid transactions that basically were legal.

Madoff, by contrast, is a nothing more than a common thief. He simply stole people's money.

In the eyes of the law, Madoff's offenses were worse and are punished with more severe penalties.

[go west young man]

29. Madoff was "needed" by the media and big banks to cover up the

biggest ponzi scheme gone bust ever that took place in September last year and the subsequent daylight robbery that took place during the demise of that ponzi scheme. The failure of the US federal reserve system and the bank bailouts. The whole think was perfectly executed and the American sheeple fell for it hook line and sinker. Bernie was a small bit player compared to what Goldman Sachs and all the others walked with.