With baseball season and the Enron trial both going on, I decided to compare the headlines of both in today's blog. Barry Bonds has dominated headlines despite the fact that he has yet to hit a homer. Now, he may be innocent of all of these charges, but it's not very likely, so for the sake of this blog I will assume that the allegations are true. His cream and clear have become synonimous with cheating and fraud, and his "alleged" steroid use has stained baseball's image with a dark streak that may never fade. So how are Barry Bonds and Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling/Bernie Ebbers/Jack Abramoff all alike? They are all men who were already the "cream of the crop", yet they all saw another level of production and were willing to do anything to achieve that. These are all men who were millionaires long before they began their scandalous behaviour, they all had fame in their respective industries and were widely respected amongst their peers.
Jack Abramoff is going to be in jail for quite a while, and he deserves to be locked away, but why/how am I comparing him to Barry Bonds? Because despite the fact that Barry was already one of the most dominant players of his era, he'd already shattered the confidence and ego of many pitchers and didn't need that extra push to attain what most others could only dream of. The arrogant greed that Abramoff personifies, can easily be attached to Bonds.
Lay/Ebbers/Skilling are all brilliant men. Ebbers wasn't highly educated, but achieved success with a shrewd business mind. He was already a multi-millionaire when he was named CEO of MCI in the mid-80s and had earned the respect of everyone within the telecom industry. But Ebbers wasn't satisfied with just being worth hundreds of millions and ended up opening the floodgates for corporate fraud. Eventually he was convicted to 25 years in prison, all for stealing money after he was already exceedingly rich. Sound familiar Bonds?
Lay and Skilling stood atop Enron, the poster child for corporate fraud and like Ebbers, were already millionaires when they started profiting off of other people's losses. Lay and Skilling, like Bonds, have not been 100% convicted, but have been so by the media and the American people. In every one of these cases, we have a man who is a role model to many and at the top of his industry, yet this man always wants more. It's a level of greed that is just unsatiable. These are men who had ambitions to not only be the best, but to shatter the paths of those who came before them.
Bonds, Giambi, Sheffield were steroid users, but what really hurts them is the fact that everything they did to get to their level of greatness before they took that cheating step will be forgotten. Their legacies will not be the home runs (or the millions of dollars made for investors in Lay, Ebbers and Skilling's case) but rather the fraud they committed. Greed isn't always about money, it's about pride too...because when you're already in the top 1%, you have no need for more unless you are basking in the pride of the moment.
Jack Abramoff is going to be in jail for quite a while, and he deserves to be locked away, but why/how am I comparing him to Barry Bonds? Because despite the fact that Barry was already one of the most dominant players of his era, he'd already shattered the confidence and ego of many pitchers and didn't need that extra push to attain what most others could only dream of. The arrogant greed that Abramoff personifies, can easily be attached to Bonds.
Lay/Ebbers/Skilling are all brilliant men. Ebbers wasn't highly educated, but achieved success with a shrewd business mind. He was already a multi-millionaire when he was named CEO of MCI in the mid-80s and had earned the respect of everyone within the telecom industry. But Ebbers wasn't satisfied with just being worth hundreds of millions and ended up opening the floodgates for corporate fraud. Eventually he was convicted to 25 years in prison, all for stealing money after he was already exceedingly rich. Sound familiar Bonds?
Lay and Skilling stood atop Enron, the poster child for corporate fraud and like Ebbers, were already millionaires when they started profiting off of other people's losses. Lay and Skilling, like Bonds, have not been 100% convicted, but have been so by the media and the American people. In every one of these cases, we have a man who is a role model to many and at the top of his industry, yet this man always wants more. It's a level of greed that is just unsatiable. These are men who had ambitions to not only be the best, but to shatter the paths of those who came before them.
Bonds, Giambi, Sheffield were steroid users, but what really hurts them is the fact that everything they did to get to their level of greatness before they took that cheating step will be forgotten. Their legacies will not be the home runs (or the millions of dollars made for investors in Lay, Ebbers and Skilling's case) but rather the fraud they committed. Greed isn't always about money, it's about pride too...because when you're already in the top 1%, you have no need for more unless you are basking in the pride of the moment.
posted by Dan Pasternack at 1:37 PM
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