It doesn't really change anything. It's not like people will get their jobs back or their retirement savings back. But I do think the trial is important. It will set a precedent of what's acceptable corporate conduct. Is it OK for executives to do anything so long as it's technically legal
More Quotes from Bethany McLean:
The story took on an importance later that it did not deserve originally. Whether I wrote that story or not, Enron would have gone bankrupt, investors would have lost billions of dollars and thousands of people would have lost their jobs. I just picked up on an underlying skepticism. If you had told me then that the company would go under by the end of the year, I would have never believed it. I was as naive as the rest of us.Bethany McLean
It was actually in retrospect a pretty meek story. It didn't say that the company is a fraud and going to go bankrupt in nine months. In fact, if you had said to me at the time that Enron is going to go under, I'd have said, 'Are you kidding' It just didn't quite make sense. In retrospect I fault myself for not questioning it more than I did.
Bethany McLean
While arguing that the Californian government was partly to blame for the chaos ( They did the wrong thing too in the way they set up their market ... Everything that's bad about it is on display here, its total rapaciousness, and after that you just can't believe that companies left to their own devices are going to do the right thing.
Bethany McLean
it was shocking to me every step of the way with Enron to look at the culpability of others in the Enron affair because it's just not a case of a few bad apples down in Houston, Texas misbehaving, it's a case of almost everyone associated with the company, inside and outside, failing to do the right thing, and it's really frightening, and I think one person in the film describes it as synergistic corruption. That's a phrase I love.
Bethany McLean
the powerful lesson from Enron for me is the power of self delusion and how people rationalise and deceive themselves. And I think when Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling say they are innocent now, as they do with their trial approaching in early 2006, they mean it on a certain level. One smart financial observer said to me that he's never met the CEO of a fraudulent company who didn't come to believe in what he'd created.
Bethany McLean
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