By now I’m sure you’ve read about Iraq Veterans Against War poser MacBeth faking that he was a US Army Ranger/SpecFor/BoogieMan whatever.
If not, I’m sure that rock you’ve been under probably stinks something fierce and you need to get out amongst the living and read this rundown from Mrs. Malkin. And this one too, while you’re clicking.
On the other side of the fence, the Klueless Kos Kids are trying to decide if they’ve even ever heard of MacBeth or if he was a right-wing plant into IVAW to discredit the organization.
If they would just follow the second Malkin link I’ve provided above, they’d remember where they heard the guy.
Also from the Kos Klan, is this post by Kos frontpager, DarkSyde, about the Lay/Skilling verdicts yesterday. His hyperbole and linkage aside, he takes a serious blow to any amount of credibility he may have had with this
Among the thousands of employees and investors ruined by Enron’s fraud were several personal friends of mine. Some of them have said they were encouraged to invest every dime they could spare into Enron common stock even as insiders allegedly unloaded large blocks. These were geologists, engineers, and line workers, easy prey for slick offers of easy money and utterly ill-equipped to rationally judge the wisdom of that advice.
Excuse me, but exactly how long do you have to go to school to be professionally employed as a geologist? 4 years? 6 years? Engineers don’t get degrees by being ignorant and stupid line guys don’t live very long.
None of those people are ‘easy prey’. They can do their own research and make their own decisions.
I’m a lowly dispatcher, a job that requires only map skills and an ability to effectively communicate, and I know not to trust my employer’s rosy reviews of their stock price and it’s potential. My co-workers are truck drivers and the vast majority of them have no college education whatsoever. Twice a year the company makes a push for us to add their stock to our 401K plans, and I have more fingers than co-workers who have bought their sales pitch.
There was no forcing of employees to buy only Enron stock, and while I’m sure that there’ll be a few folks who think I’m ‘blaming the victims’, I’m not seeing any ‘victims’, only people who made bad choices.
Darksyde’s playing of highly educated professionals as too stupid to do their own investing is just more of what we saw during the discussion of Private Social Security Accounts. The left wants to convince as many people as they can that government is the safest place for your money because you couldn’t do it all by your little old self.
Personally, I think they’re projecting.
“Projecting”?
Let’s call a spade a spade here, AK. They are “lying”.
I’ve repeatedly heard and read that you never want to have more than 10% of your investment money in one place.
Following that rule, I don’t see how anyone lost all their money…
I hit submit before I made this statement:
Anyone that doesn’t follow the 10% rule, is an idiot and deserves what happended to them.
I am a geologist and resent the implication that by virtue of my education/vocation that I am somehow of diminished capacity and unable to render judgement as to the fitness of an investment. It was, I thought, fairly common knowledge in the industry that ENRON was on shaky ground in the early 90’s as a result of some of the creative financing. I am still amazed that ENRON was able to get some of their “projects” past the SEC. That is a question that needs an answer.
What the Enronites are *really* pissing and moaning about is that they didn’t get to sell high like the muckty-mucks did and stick an outsider with the loss…. They are pissed that someone else didn’t take the bath when Enron finally exploded.