On All Counts

So Bernie Ebbers was convicted on all counts today. Good. But I'll save the champagne until I hear his sentence. You know, if some 18 year-old kid steals my 1995 Acura Integra for a joy ride, there's a pretty good chance he'll do more time in a much more hellish place than a lot of these corporate crimminals -- these crimminals whose crimes affect hundreds, often thousands of people. My husband was (and still is) an employee of UUnet/Worldcom/MCI (whatever they want to call themselves these days) and we were fortunate and came out of it relatively unscathed. He didn't lose his job, he never bought shares of the company (he considered it several times, the old "it can't go any lower" argument, luckily he's married to a company stock pessimist who never let him), didn't put his retirement money into the stock, etc. A lot of people did lose their jobs and their savings and their retirements. A lot of those people were pretty close to their retirements too -- not much time to pick up the pieces and start again. When the shit hit the fan in the summer of 2002 we experienced several months of uncertainity and started cutting back to prepare just in case. I cancelled my Vermont Studio Center residency, which isn't a big deal compared to what a lot of other people had to give up, but I probably would have wrote something brilliant and wonderful while I was up there. I blame Bernie Ebbers for that. He has a lot to account for. Fraud, conspirator, liar, poem killer.