but Enron employees are by no means unique and IMO deserve no special consideration.

I've hears a lot of complaints about how their 401Ks - heavily invested in company stock BY CHOICE - are now essentially worthless. The same thing happened at a company called ColorTile several years ago and I didn't hear anyone crying over them.

Likewise, corporations go bankrupt all too often and leave their employees in the lurch. When will we have congressional hearings on the K Mart bankrupsy, the Global Crossing bankrupsy (many of the same allegations of shady accounting practices apply there as well) or the dozens (hundreds?) of dot-coms that became dot-bombs?

Not only were many of the dot-com employees left in the lurch when their companies folded, many of them were left with huge tax liabilities on the now worthless stock options they'd received during the glory days. I don't recall any Congressional hearings when www.dumbassidea.com and www.profitwhatsthat.com folded.

I don't know for certain which (if any) laws were broken at Enron. If laws were broken, then prosecute the hell out of those involved and put them in a jail (a real one, not a country club prison). I don't know how many rank and file Enron employees were in the loop on the apparently shady practices but it was probably only a small percentage of them. They should be prosecuted, too. The Nuremberg Trials wiped out the "I was only following orders" defense long ago.

Still, the taxpayers are under no obligation to make the Enron employees whole. If my company goes bankrupt tomorrow, I know for certain there will be no federal bailout like there was for Chrystler in the 1970s, nor should there be.