Give a Man a Fish, Teach a Man to Fish

NEW ORLEANS (SNARKY) -- The Christian parable reads, "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime."

Simple. Beautiful. Jesus!

Give a man a $2000 FEMA debit card and he'll withdraw it at a casino: Laissez Le Bon Temps Rouler! Then he'll game the system to get another card. And then still another card. And another.

Greed is a powerful (and ubiquitous!) thing. So we shouldn't be surprised when the disenchanted and disenfranchised take advantage of a porous and poorly thought-out system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

But we shouldn't be angry either: he never learned how to fish.

Meanwhile, some 350 miles west of New Orleans in a Houston courtroom, the trial of two former Enron CEOs is underway. The defendants, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, face a litany of charges including fraud and conspiracy. Their financial parlor tricks took down a company with 11,000 employees and erased countless billions in pensions and benefits.

Lay and Skilling knew how to fish. For themselves.

With the company's imminent nosedive on the horizon, the executives along with several other top managers cashed out more than $1.1 billion in equity.

You can eat fish for an eternity with that kind of scratch. What's on the menu, Lucifer?

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Technorati: Katrina, Enron, Nuance, Lukateake