Throughout the late 1990s, Enron was universally considered one of the country's most innovative companies -- a new-economy maverick that forsook musty, old industries with their cumbersome, hard assets in favor of the freewheeling world of e-commerce. The company continued to build power plants and operate gas lines, but it became better known for its unique trading businesses. Besides buying and selling gas and electricity futures, it created whole new markets for such oddball "commodities" as a broadcast time for advertisers, weather futures, and Internet bandwidth. If there were justice in the world, we could all sit back and relax, knowing that Enron executives got what they deserved for their corruption and mismanagement. The problem is, Enron's collapse has put thousands of innocent Americans out of work and wiped out the retirement portfolios of thousands more. Here's what happened.
             When Enron stock took a nosedive last fall, its corporate captains decided not to go down with the ship. They and their top investors sold their stock while hiding the true financial condition of the company from everyone else. In fact, Lay lied to Enron's small investors, telling them that the company's future had never looked brighter. As if that's not bad enough, after years of encouraging their employees to invest their retirement savings almost exclusively in Enron stock, Enron leaders banned those same employees from selling that stock even as the prices plummeted and while they were bailing out. By the time investors knew that the company was bankrupt, it was too late. Their stock was worthless, and their bosses had dumped and run. Enron employees weren't the only ones harmed. Individually, and collectively, Enron's management failed to carry out its substantive responsibility for ensuring that the transactions were fair to Enron--which in many cases they were not.
             Enron's downfall, caused in part by the accounting treatment of a s...