No Exit

Clang, clang, clang goes the lockdown

The play ends as a tragedy. All three of the major characters lived a morally reprehensible life that doomed them to Hell; when they are given a chance to escape from Hell, they choose to remain, knowing that there is No Exit from their evil natures. For them, life on earth was no different than life in Hell; at least in their present circumstance, they have only each other to torment.

--Monkey Notes

"No Exit" by Jean Paul Sartre

Many years ago the late reporter and editor Mike Kelly recited one of the rules of life passed on by his father and his grandfather before him. "Never stick up a candy store," Kelly's forebears counseled.

The kooky crooks in today's headlines that ran major American corporations--and then ran them into the ground--mystify me.

They did not stick up candy stores.

With hubris, chutzpah, chicanery and insatiable greed they made millions, stole billions, ruined tens of thousands of lives, pleaded ignorance in court and will soon meekly surrender to authorities to spend the rest of their lives in jail.

The overriding question: How did these guys lose touch with reality?

A Quick Look at the Players (in Alphabetical Ordure)

Bernard Ebbers, age 63, about whom CBC News said, "he was regarded as the ultimate Christian businessman." His net worth at one time was put at $1 billion. Ebbers was found guilty of ordering his CFO, Scott Sullivan, to perpetrate the $11 billion accounting fraud at WorldCom. From CBC News:

Around the same time, Ebbers bought a toy, a huge yacht he named Aquasition (http://www.waterfantaseas.com/mega/mega8_20.html) in honour of all his deals. And he began diversifying his WorldCom wealth, buying half of a yacht-making shipyard in Savannah, Georgia, a high-tech lumber mill in his home of Brookhaven and back in Canada, the Douglas Lake Ranch in B.C., the largest working ranch in Canada, with 20,000 head of cattle (once owned by the Woodward retailing family). But his biggest investment was in 460,000 acres of timberland in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.