Author: Lisa H. Newton

PREFACE

For those who treasure justice, this time has its peculiar satisfactions.
As I write this preface, some time after completing the text of
this book, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling have just been convicted
of fraud and conspiracy. When last heard from, imprisoned
Dennis Kozlowski was attempting to get his insurance company
to cover his $17.8 million in legal costs, even as he agreed to pay
the state of New York $21.2 million in evaded taxes. WorldCom
CEO Bernard Ebbers was sentenced to 25 years in prison, John
and Timothy Rigas were also sentenced to jail. Enron CFO
Andy Fastow not only is serving time in jail, but I understand
that he may not be able to hold on to his enormous mansion in
Texas, built specifically to sink his ill-gotten gains into something
that could not be taken away. His wife has already served her sentence
for her part in the Enron fraud.

The sentencing of Lay and Skilling, undoubted poster children
for the evil committed by the overprivileged at the expense of
the overtrusting, is scheduled for September 11, 2006. The date
is symbolically correct. It is five years to the day since our world
changed forever, in the collapse, in terrorist attack, of the towering
symbols of our financial supremacy, and the nation will never
trust the air again. Lay and Skilling and all the others flew their
greed into the centuries-old fabric of the business system, and
watched our trust in the entire enterprise fall in pieces. We are
diminished, our world is less safe, and we are understandably
unhappy; no one likes to be told that the oaks against which we
have leaned are but broken reeds. We have been betrayed, and
our lives are the poorer for the terrible loss of trust.

But in the end, in another sense, we are the better for it. We
assumed that all that we had built was sound and strong and safe,
and that we could attend to our work, games, and shopping without
thinking about them. Now we know what we long have recited,
that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, not to mention the
price of the integrity of our business system. We have watched
the disgrace, conviction, and imprisonment of people who were
not necessarily bad, they just needed watching – they needed us
to be watching, and we were not. We must not make that mistake
again.

Why do we have to watch, and how shall we do it? This short
book attempts to answer those questions.