Bernie Weeps Alone

Or at least without me. I’m thinking of starting a "no sypmathy" policy for "successful" people who experience a fall through the manifestation of their own arrogance or apathy. So,  I don’t weep for Bernard Ebbers or anyone like him.

Bernard Ebbers, who as the once-swaggering CEO of WorldCom oversaw the largest corporate fraud in U.S. history, wept in court Wednesday when a judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison — the toughest sentence yet in the string of recent corporate scandals.

Ebbers, now 63, would go to prison in October and not be eligible for release until he was 85. The sentence was handed down by Judge Barbara Jones of U.S. District Court in Manhattan three years after WorldCom collapsed in an $11 billion accounting fraud, wiping out billions of investor dollars.

…At the sentencing hearing, Henry J. Bruen Jr., 37, a former WorldCom salesman, told the court the company’s collapse caused "untold human carnage" and put him through "sheer hell." He lost all of his savings and couldn’t get another sales job.

My sympathies liek more with those who ended up as the "human carnage" left behind in the wake of the fraud that occured on Ebbers’ watch. So Ebbers family will have to settle for a "a modest home in Jackson, Miss"  — instead of the lavish one they had before — and $50,000 of his assets. That’s a lot more than some of the people further down the food chain ended up with after the dust settled.

One truth that I continue to learn in my life is that shit always flows downhill, and invariably when some people get to the top of the hill they usually end up crapping on the rest of us.