Enron is breathing its last gasps. Trials are in progress for its former chairman, Ken Lay and president, Jeffrey Skilling. Before the year is out, we'll likely know whether they're found guilty of crimes relating to misleading investors in the second largest bankruptcy in history. Even after the echoes of the trial fade, Enron will be a benchmark of corporate malfeasance and catastrophe for a long time to come. Or at least it should.

Because of its size, Enron managed to splatter a lot of people when it hit the ground. Even Seattle Mayor Greg Nickel's State of the City speech of two weeks ago referred to Seattle City Light retiring its "short term Enron notes." Enron was one of the companies that allegedly helped manipulate the energy market following California's botched deregulation. When the cost of electricity soared, Seattle City Light, faced with buying market rate power to cover demand, had to take on hundreds of millions of dollars of debt to pay the inflated prices. It follows that anyone who paid a City Light electrical bill in the last four years - and that covers just about everyone in Ballard not using candlelight regularly - had to pay, in effect, an Enron penalty until that debt was retired.

But the collapse of Enron had impacts beyond electrical rates. At least one retired machinist in Federal Way lost roughly $10,000 in portfolio value because of the collapse. It didn't turn him out on the street, but it was enough to make him worry, a little more than usual, about stretching his retirement dollars.

The story of Enron's collapse is chronicled in "Conspiracy of Fools," by Kurt Eichenwald, a New York Times correspondent. Eichenwald starts with the company's origins in the 1980s, and the origins of its lack of executive oversight - mostly in the form of Ken Lay. When Enron began in the energy trading business, the company morphed from a sleepy gas pipeline owner into a fortune ten company, with billions in revenues and offices all over the world. In the late 90s, Enron's stock price went sky-high thanks to a succession of business quarters where profits exceeded expectations. Alas, the successes couldn't be sustained. Enter Enron's old wound, lack of oversight. Soon, the books were being cooked, in most cases, by creating companies with Enron stock that were effectively independent, in name, from Enron. These companies could buy up Enron's under performing projects, and Enron could start declaring every transaction profitable, even the ones that should have been big losses. Enron created a pretend world where customers bought up whatever Enron needed them to, so the company could post phenomenal earnings.

Some Enron employees illegally enriched themselves though these off-the-books machinations, but for the most part, Eichenwald portrays Enron not as much corrupt as simply incompetent, hence the title of the book. The man at the top, Ken Lay, plays a central role - and, it should be noted, his trial defense is similar to his characterization in the book and he was one of Eichenwald's key sources.

In the book, Lay is a former visionary who once upon a time, executed on his vision grandly. He became wealthy and among the elite of Houston society, hobnobbing with the Bush clan. But at Enron, the chairman was a figurehead; affable, but out of touch. So far removed, in fact, that he allowed lieutenants to plant the seeds for the company's destruction while in the process of ripping it off, and was unaware of impeding doom until the eve of its bankruptcy. Eventually it would shed thousands of jobs and sell off $60 billion in assets.

How such egregious mismanagement - by a number of executives, and not just one or two bad seeds - could be allowed to exist in a company important enough to have baseball fields named after it is one of the questions Eichenwald seeks to answer.

On a cynical level, Enron might come off as just a sort of Peter Principle, on a vast scale. Incompetent or immoral people tend to hire people even less competent, or less moral, as a kind of built in insurance policy that they're never inadvertently hiring their own replacements.

Eichenwald posits something similar. In his story, it's partly loyalty that dooms Enron - the kind of loyalty that blinds both parties. Leaders accept the loss of competence for security, and subordinates make sure their leaders never hear anything that might indicate the trade off was a bad idea. It's the Peter Principle on a grand scale - a pyramid built on wobbly blocks. And if you don't think such troubled construction can exist at even the loftiest of institutions, you're not doing a heck of a job, Brownie.