Slashdot Mirror
Enron's Kenneth Lay Dies
Don420 writes "This morning the biggest corporate criminal in modern history, Kenneth Lay, died of a massive coronary before he could receive his sentence. Lay was found guilty of being in charge of the scheme that had many lose their live-savings through a scheme of complex offshore holdings and is to thank for our having to live with Sarbanes-Oxely." From the article: "Enron filed for bankruptcy in December 2001 after investigators found it had used partnerships to conceal more than $1 billion in debt and inflate profits. Enron's downfall cost 4,000 employees their jobs and many of them their life savings, and led to billions of dollars of losses for investors."
Good Riddance.
Kenneth Lay tragically passes away due to a massive heart attack before he receives his sentence. Impeccable timing...
Two possible scenarios (in addition to the official version of events) come immediately to mind:
- or -
Either scenario seems equally likely, and much more likely than 'Ken keeled over because he couldn't keep his LDLs in check'.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
But to whom?
see you in hell!
'nuf said.
/. filters}
{damn
until I see a body. Just a little too convenient. /where the hell's my tinfoil hat?
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
Not to be crass, but given that he was a guy of some means who was potentially looking at some serious jail time, I'd like to see his dead body before I believe it.
"Had a coronary" could be a euphamism for "on a private jet to Argentina"...
Ted Bundy was polite and charming too.
Why is it that the ones who deserve the most punishment for what they've done always conveniently die or vanish before they can be punished?
Resurrect him, I don't care how, then punish him most painfully, then re-kill him, as far as I'm concerned.
Oh, and let's parade photos of his dead body through the streets just like we did with that dead terrorist a few months ago.
Prove he's dead.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Does this remove the Lay family fortune (if any) from any criminal penalties?
So, now everybody here who keeps saying "Ken Lay did blah blah blah and never faced any jail time" is actually right.
I hope BSD isn't really dying...
Do you have ESP?
Construction has begun at the Hope Memorial Cemetery to install new drainage tiles in anticipation of the 4,000+ people expected to arrive within the next week to piss on Mr. Lay's grave.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Ethical paragon Kenneth Lay was found dead in his Colorado home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to business culture. Truly an American icon.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Dear God, for the sake of humanity, please take the rest of those corrupt Republican potato chips!
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
As others have said, it is possible he's not dead, and that this is simply a ruse to prevent prosecution.
I'll also believe the cause of Lay's death after we hear it from a coroner or a physician rather than his attorney or his priest.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Enron filed for bankruptcy in December 2001 after investigators found it had used partnerships to conceal more than $1 billion in debt and inflate profits
... not 5 years later.
I honestly woulda thought he woulda died of a heart attack back in 2001 when they filed for bankruptcy
God opted for the death penalty.
he grew this whole company, Enron, from nothing So what did he grow it into? Sure, it wound up at #7 on the Forbes 500, but it wound up at nothing.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that had Enron actually stayed a "nothing", we would have been better off. A lot of people lost their jobs, and life savings because of him.
Interesting that any life insurance he held will still go to any named beneficiaries and cannot be tapped to help settle for any judgments/judgements against him.
So were Carlon Ponzi and Reed Slatkin. It's a common trait among perps in the con game.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Actually, everyone who decided that Enron and a handful of others could be extrapolated to the entire US economy are the ones to thank for our having to live with Sarbanes-Oxley.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Sure, nobody just keels over and dies from a heart attack. That never happens. And anybody who talks about "stress factors" like being pilloried in front of millions of people or facing spending the rest of his life in prison, is just spreading misinformation. And if you mention the fact that he was in his 60s, you've just got your head up your ass.
If he faked his death, what kind of new charges would he be looking at? Fraud and conspiracy? Already pretty full on those...
I doubt it's faked.
I doubt it was the government, because they want to see him punished as a way of showing that they're "tackling" the problem.
I doubt it was cholesterol either... as he would have been on any medication around to stop that.
My bet is that facing a very probable "rest of your life in real actual PMITA prison" (A 20 year sentence would ahve effectively been life for a man of his age) the stress got him.
At least he saved us the tax dollars it would have cost to shelter and feed him.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Really, Lay wasn't the architect, he just covered it up until he could figure out how to get away from the mess without it sinking him. If you want to know more about who really created the fiasco, watch Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and see. Also see how the present administration was complicit in the California Energy Crisis.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ted Bundy was polite and charming too.
..unless the polite charming people also have a lot of money
Well that does it! No more hanging around polite charming people for me. From now on I'm only going to associate with people that have demonic beady eyes and fresh blood dripping from their chin.
-
He did not grow Enron from nothing, it was simply a merger of two large energy corporations:
"Lay worked in the early '70s as a federal energy regulator. He then became undersecretary for the Department of the Interior before he returned to the business world as an executive at Florida Gas. By the Reagan administration, when energy was deregulated, Lay was already an energy company executive and he took advantage of the new climate by merging Houston Natural Gas Co. with Nebraska-based Inter-North to form Enron in 1985."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Lay
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult suggests that to win the favour of Rand's school, one must not only be a ruthless and free-thinking businessman, but one must also adore Rand as a person. For all the Objectivists' talk of self-reliance and independence, they really just want to pull people into their personality cult. If Ken Lay had paid his dues to Peikoff and quoted Rand on a regular basis, he'd be seen as their hero, but since he didn't, they probably don't care about him at all.
Al Capone
If it was possible for us to ask him a question right now (I am an atheist and don't believe in souls or god or anything,) would he have done it the same way again given a chance, I wonder what his answer would have been. Life taught me however, that no matter how much regret people feel because of something that, given a chance they would have done a better job at concealing the evidence but they most likely would have still done the same thing.
Any thoughts?
You can't handle the truth.
God for the win!!!
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
A lot of people lost their ... life savings because of him.
Nobody was obligated to put their own money into Enron's 401k plan (and therefore into Enron stock). Anyone who invested more than 15% of their portfolio into it was probably warned several times of the risk in doing so. He may certainly have been responsible for them losing *their Enron stock's value*, but they had no excuse for making it such a big chunk of their investments. Ken Lay did not make them invest such a huge fraction in Enron.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Is he REALLY dead?
Most of his cash "vanished" shortly before his arrest, and his assets were never frozen.
When Lay collapsed, his personal assistant called Lay's personal doctor, not an ambulance. It was Lay's personal physician who pronounced Lay dead.
Lay's will, revised just a couple of months ago, calls for his cremation, and his widow was out of the country when he died. She's reportedly having medical complications from "The shock of her belove husband's sudden death." As a result, she's not expected to return to the states for the funeral.
Details on who signed the death certificate are fuzzy, but there are no plans for an autopsy. He's scheduled for cremation tomorrow morning.
Any bets there's no actual body in the casket, or if there is, it's not Ken Lay's?
This morning the biggest corporate criminal in modern history, Kenneth Lay, died of a massive coronary...
/duck
You just watch... I'll bet he is lying yet once again.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
The greatest genocidal doctor in history, Joseph Mengele, also died peacefully without paying his debts.
I do believe though that their afterlives are anything but peaceful.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Seriously, some days I just want to punch all the cryptoloons in the balls. And if they don't have balls, I'll graft donor balls onto them and punch those.
Damn, I need more vacation.
.. he saved the state some $ now that they don't have to warehouse him in jail.
I wonder how much that was...
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
So this is "news for nerds, stuff that matters"? The only thing Ken Lay had to contribute was a good joke about California during the blackouts.
Q: What's the difference between the Titantic and California?
A: The Titantic lights were still on.
Sometimes, it's the rags-to-riches types who go to these extremes, because they're deluded by their own success into believing that they can pull off just about anything, and even in their darkest hour, they've got a plan for wriggling out and turning things around. I'm sure at some point in this whole saga, Lay and Skilling and the rest had a few moments of trepidation when they were crossing the legal line, but a few rationalizations later, they're off and running and all that is in the rearview mirror.
That hard-working, affable manner doesn't excuse their crimes in the least. Let 'em put those skills to work in federal, PMITA prison.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I don't know about the fresh blood, but most demonic beady eyed people are just morons, from my personal experience, and not actually bad people.
Either way, someone who looks dangerous doesn't get away with many crimes, so if they look dangerous and act that way too, they are probably already behind bars.
Well that does it! No more hanging around polite charming people for me. From now on I'm only going to associate with people that have demonic beady eyes and fresh blood dripping from their chin.
Hello new friend! Wanna go throw rocks at my neighors cat?
Sweet informative mod.
How about "life savings"?
I would rather he go through due punishment, but I guess God decided he was too evil and killed him off ahead of time.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Mod Parent up; that was hysterical!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Ken Lay was a regular rags-to-riches story. Easy to do when you are ripping off and lieing to folks. It is much more difficult to do it honestly, such as Warren Buffett. Oh well, I always thought that the man would not serve a day in prison.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Did he take out a few short-term personal loans to increase the irony?
-- If you're posting to be funny, and your sig is funnier . . . .
OK, everybody knows they can do anything better than anyone else, and there is no real point to following rules created by others. But, in order to end the fighting and constant bickering, we put up with these little annoyances called rules, regulations, and laws. Given that they are silly and pointless, what Other Reasons could there be to not increase corporate financial accountability?
Seems to me anything that puts the CEO, COO, CFO and every other cheif of a company right in the line of fire for criminal and civil liability is a good thing. The Board Officers should be there too of course. To me, the CEO and Chairman are like the Captain of a ship or a Genereal on the battlefield. You Are in Charge and You Are Responsible. If you say the company is in XYZ condition, it damn well ought to be and if we can prove you lied about it, you go to prison. Youd don't get to hide by saying, "the underlings run the company and I don't have a clue". Nothing should be hidden from "conventional interpretation" by some warped usage of accounting and bookkeeping practices. If you want to create a high risk, closed box operation, there are legal ways to do that without hiding it from your investors.
Sunlight and visibility in all the operations should be normal operating procedure, not an inconvienience to be endured.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
I hope they bury him face down... so he sees where the f**k he's going.
FTA:
"He lost a fortune, his family lost a fortune."
I haven't followed this very closely at all, but I seem to recall that most of these guys kept at least one, if not two or more, very nice houses, worth in the millions. It's not the billions they were worth on paper, but c'mon, that's not losing the entire fortune, especially when the "billions" were an illusion.
It really bothers me that most of the threads in this story are either "we should let employees piss on his corpse" or "he's not dead!". Assuming that he is in fact dead, aren't we forgetting something? Irrespective of what he presided over and did, he was a human being. He doubtless had people who cared about him, who will be mourning his death. As a human, no matter what sins he committed in life, we should show some respect - if nothing else for the sake of his family and loved ones.
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
According to MSFTextrememakover, the total shareholder value lost at Tyco, Lucent, Worldcom, and Enron combined was $192 billion, but since 1999 the total shareholder value lost for Microsoft alone is $360 billion. Take that for what you will.
A 64 year old man after years of extremely stresssful situation has a heart attack.
The time to 'turnover' anyone passed years ago.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Isn't "coronary" an adjective? You can't die of an adjective.
In other words, total bullshit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Lay
"Lay worked in the early '70s as a federal energy regulator. He then became undersecretary for the Department of the Interior before he returned to the business world. He became an executive at Florida Gas. By the Reagan administration, when energy was deregulated, Lay was already an energy company executive and he took advantage of the new climate by merging Houston Natural Gas Co. with Nebraska-based Inter-North to form Enron in 1985,
Lay was one of America's highest-paid CEOs, earning (for example) a $42.4 million compensation package in 1999.[1] Lay sold large amounts of his Enron stock in September and October of 2001 as its price fell, while encouraging employees to buy more stock, telling them the company would rebound. Lay liquidated more than $300 million in Enron stock from 1989 to 2001, mostly in stock options."
Yeah, that's a real "built the company from nothing" story. Where's my rolleyes smiley?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
At the end of the dotcom bubble I was working in downtown San Francisco. We used to have rolling blackouts and everybody would leave the building for a couple hours and enjoy themselves. Anyways, the servers weren't running and nobody was making money (except for the CEOs, they always make money.)
I asked my brother, an electrician at a Bay Area biotech, what the hell was going on and he didn't know.
It turns out that this fucking company Enron was turning off power-plants willy-nilly so they could profit off the spike in energy consumption somehow. So, while hospitals and grandma Millie are sitting in the dark these jackasses in Texas are laughing their asses off all the way to the bank.
It also turns out that our pussy governor could have sent the National Guard to ONE fucking powerplant and took it over. When the assholes from Enron call to take it offline they would pick up the phone: "could you turn the power off so we can spike the grid and make a lot of money?" "Uhhhh, this is Col. Soandso of the California National Guard. Who's this?" "Nevermind..." hangup. (Enron stops shenanigans.)
Oh well, Ken Lay, may you rot in the eighth circle of Dante's Hell: reserved for those guilty of deliberate fraudulent evil.
Death is never funny... ... except when it is.
In Soviet Russia these Soviet Russia jokes aren't considered the least bit amusing...
And from experience, when you look "menacing" you also don't get away with the crimes you weren't responsible for, heh...
Enron is very relevant to the huge amount of auditing infrastructure that so many IT grunts were required to add to their corporate systems in the past few years.
Does anyone know how this affects his families liability concerning the Enron fraud? I haven't really followed the story very closely, mostly reading only the headlines, but I seem to remember he has already paid a lot of fines? Or maybe he just lost so much money due to the stock crash. In any case, does anyone know if the inheritors of his estate are now liable to any damages he might have done to the shareholders or employees of Enron? And can the courts take fines out of his estate before his inheritors (his wife, I guess?) take it?
The world may never know exactly how much Ken Lay was involved in the whole Enron fiasco. But although he probably wasn't nearly as devious and manipulative as CEO Jeff Skilling or CFO Andy Fastow, Ken Lay was still the captain of the ship and deserves much of the blame for Enron's collapse.
From what I've read of him, Ken had several flaws:
So although Ken may not have been the greedy manipulator that his underlings were, he reminds me a lot of a pleasant, but wimpy and passive dad who's let his children run wild with no discipline from their earliest days, then protests that he's not to blame when they turn into terrors 10-15 years later.
For a fascinating account of the rise and fall of Enron, I would highly recommend the book The Smartest Guys In the Room. You don't have to understand all the arcane ins-and-outs of accounting to follow the story, which really is pretty fascinating. (I believe there's a documentary movie based on the book as well...)
"He was pushed... They "Cliff Baxter'd" Kenny. You know Cliff, he's the guy who committed suicide with the wildly innacurate and seldom lethal shot cartridges, that also make it forensically challenging to plot ballistic trajectory.
Kenny-boy suggested the VP role for Cheney to the Shrub. He was part of the "energy taskforce" that they are so desparate to keep under wraps. Like Dr. Kelly... Like... The list is big and convenient.
Or did his poor heart break, because it was too good for this world? I don't think so!
Another crony about to sing like a Canary to cop a plea...
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
well, all those qualities just made him a better "social engineer" is all.
When it comes right down to it, he was still a con man.
Understanding is much like a 3-edged-sword. in this: there are always 2 sides and the truth.
Ken Lay was the CEO of a corporation that defrauded its employees and investors. He was Chiefly responsible for all Executive decisions. If he did not know what was going on in his own company under his watch, than he still defrauded the investors by drawing a salary and stock options while clearly being incompetent at his job.
It's justice for a man to die for theft and fraud?
I realize he stold millions of dollars. I realize that he cost the jobs of thousands of people. I realize he ruined many innocent people's lives. It's pretty obvious that this guy was a scum ball.
But how does that justify calling his death "justice"? Would it be justice if he was killed by the government or one of his bilked former employees?
Take away his money, his reputation, and his freedom... but don't call his death justice.
"This morning the biggest corporate criminal in modern history, Kenneth Lay, died of a massive coronary before he could receive his sentence."
Now THAT is what I call a karma mod!
So is everyone in elected office. It's a common trait among perps in the con game.
Everyone's missed by someone. He achieved something very few people do, though.. people will be talking about him for generations. For better or worse, he's a part of history now.
"Ken Lay was a regular rags-to-riches story. He grew up in Missouri and he was a son of a preacher. He was one of five children, and he grew this whole company, Enron, from nothing...."
He may have had is good point, but if I were his family, I'd keep his burial site secret.
Why is parent modded down? People have a right to be upset they lost money, but it's still their responsibility to invest responsibly so that when disaster does strike, it's not across your entire portfolio.
What was a convicted felon, awaiting sentencing, doing on vacation? His ass should have been in jail.
My other sig is extremely clever...
Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Kenneth Lay:
Stop, traveller, and piss.
The biggest corporate criminal in modern history hasn't been caught yet.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Oh my god, they killed Kenny!
It's never so bad that it can't get worse.
I heard on the radio leaked info from the coroner that he had Viagra in his system. Makes sense; going away to prison for what amounts to a life sentence and all.
On another note, what's with most press accounts characterizing his death is a tragedy?
...as if the black heart of one of the Empire has just ceased to exist.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Well that does it! No more hanging around polite charming people for me.
I often sense that people who are overly formal and curteous are hiding behind a facade. I don't like them very much. I prefer those who, while still being polite, show their true natures, and don't attempt to be something they're not. Of course, I practive what I preach so when people don't recieve the usual barrage of trite curteousies from me, they probably tend to assume that I'm being rude. The way I see it, putting on a facade is being rude.
May the Maths Be with you!
So didn't I just see this on a Dead Zone episode? Snake venom, heart attack, problem solved?
Look: faced with a life-long jail sentence and plunging my family into poverty or winking out prematurely and letting them collect my fat-ass life insurance...which would I choose? Hrm.
The last greedy, selfish thing the man ever did was perhaps the most selfless, at least to his family. I hope somebody is running tox screenings for exotic substances...Kevorkian meets Capitalism.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
I think you are mistaken.
Hmmmm....
Ken Lay (Cheny - Energy Adivisory Board - Heart Attack)
Vince Foster (Clinton - Whitewater involvement - Suicide)
William Casey (Reagan - Iran Contra - Brain Tumor)
A guy eulogizes someone who he had a good deal of respect for and you piss on his grave.
Need anyone be reminded of the thousands of employees, shareholders and suppliers that the late Mr Lay metaphorically urinated, on as he profited from their misfortune? Who eulogizes for them?
May the Maths Be with you!
That's unfair. I don't need to say why.
"Finish your dinner." -Your Mom
For those not paying attention, Ken Lay was already found guilty, and therefore already prosecuted. He was awaiting sentencing when this happened.
This has nothing to do with nerd's news. This place ........
... Standards and Practices !
I should know better.
PenGun
Do What Now ???
Hey Karl Rove, thanks for the heart warming bio of the greedbag that was Kenneth Lay.
"But this one goes to 11!"
He's probably in some South American country sipping on pina coladas. -- Hitler was vegetarian.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
> he grew this whole company, Enron, from nothing
Yeah, wasn't that what led to the company's collapse?
To me, the CEO and Chairman are like the Captain of a ship or a Genereal on the battlefield.
So you're saying that Lay died from some kind of genereal disease?
I'm sure Ken Lay has had some/many redeeming qualities, but your long verbiage did nothing to illuminate on those qualities. Basically, he was "nice" to you and others. He wasn't convicted of being not nice, was he? I don't mean to piss on a deceased man, but to piss on your counterproductive post - it infuriuates more than it persudaes.
No, I say it was FOXDIE. Now, will this be marked trolling or off-topic?
Y helo thar
After seeing "The Smartest Guys in the Room" and learning about how he screwed honest people out of their life-long savings, this SOB should be rotting in a jail cell. One worker in the movie had $300,000 in company stock (his entire life savings) in his 401k - and had to cash it in for $1200. The guy was in his late 50's. I'm just sad nobody choked him like a bitch before he died. A heart attack was just too easy for this scumbag.
they killed Kenny!
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Dishonor will not trouble me, once I am dead. -- Euripides
OK, safe to say that most Americans are probably not shedding a tear for this guy. Had nothing, made himself rich through hard work, then let it go to his head and couldn't face failure, so he bilked others out of billions. We're all a little poorer thanks to his machinations.
OTOH, he was human -- proud, flawed, and subject to the passions of the animal. He was probably not the anti-Christ, didn't kill people, chop them up, and keep them in his freezer for future barbecues, nor order the death of millions because he thought they led to the downfall of his nation in the previous war. Villify him if you wish, call him the criminal he was, but now his impact is for history to decide.
And BTW, Skilling is still here to take the rap.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
It seems obvious from all the anti-Lay comments on slashdot that the average reader really hasn't read enough about the Enron trial to understand that Lay really wasn't the evil that our government said he was.
The Enron fiasco occurred 100% due to over-regulation of many different markets, including the wholesale energy business, the retail energy business, the accounting regulations on larger corporations and the myriad of acceptable loopholes that existed in the tax law up until they fell. Enron was supported by many politicians because many politicians had their hands in that big pie of money Enron would make for them.
What laws were broken by Lay? "Conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud." What does that mean exactly? It means that they didn't jump through the regulation hoops the way that your government mandated they do. As a business owner myself, I can tell you that I will NEVER want to run a big business (which helps the economy at every level) because of the government's rules that change on a whim.
Securities fraud cases are always "derivative" crimes, meaning they are made up crimes -- there were no actual victims who were harmed physically from these actions. Much of the blame for Enron's collapse should be pointed to Alan Greenspan who created money out of thin air with his decade of inflationary monetary policy. This money that was easily created was just as easily invested in thousands of publicly traded companies -- this investment caused stock prices to go up and allowed many companies to spend like no tomorrow. As more money was created by Greenspan, more people wanted a piece of the stock market pie -- fraudulent as it is.
I'm not defending the late Lay, but I don't think he did much more than piss off a bunch of politicians who lost their money as well. We should be stringing Greenspan up on a pole for all to see, but instead he makes $150,000 per speech defending his terrible money supply fraud.
What happened to Lay happened to Martha Stewart as well. Stocks lost value, the general idiotic public wanted some throats to be cut, so throats were cut. Nothing illegal happened, the law is too complicated for anyone to really gauge legal from illegal. They just wanted meat, and they got it.
Of course in my mind anyone who runs a State-subsidized corporation deserves to go down with the ship, but Lay was no different than any number of politicians many slashdotters love and admire. They're all crooks in terms of free market theory, and that is what matters most to me.
Oh yes, that horrible Democratic corruption which stains dresses, makes cigars smell like fish, and relieves the president's pent up tension after working all night to pass a budget after the god-fearing Republicans shut down the government. I forgot to mention that. Thanks for reminding me.
I Miss Monica - Ode to an intern.
<sarcasm>I'm glad to know you Republican ass-holes are still fighting the good fight against consentual blow-jobs. Blow jobs kill a lot more people than senseless wars, and they cost taxpayers much more than $293,646,760,794. I'm glad you have your priorities straight, and that you aren't hipocrits for hold double standards.</sarcasm>
-Don
PS: <truth>Ann Coulter is a MAN, baby! And if you want to fuck her, then you're gay!<truth>
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
and better luck next time.
Hmmmmmm...... What fortune does this portend.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You forgot "Bastards"
...you Bastards!
I'm sorry, I can't be anything but damn happy about this. My only disappointment is that he didn't actually serve some time behind bars before dying. He and his cronies were pure scum, worse than any blue-collar criminal by far. A street thug ends up ruining a few people's lives -- these manipulative assholes ruined thousands of people's lives as they sat in their comfy boardrooms and made their schemes.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
I am told that Sen. Joe McCarthy (who easily wrecked as many lives as Lay) couldn't understand why anyone would be unhappy with him. I'm not saying he was a psychopath ... well maybe.
n t/personality/psychopathy_checklist.html
Just in case, here's a link to the psychopathy checklist:
http://www.swin.edu.au/victims/resources/assessme
He grew up in Missouri and he was a son of a preacher. He was one of five children, and he grew this whole company, Enron, from nothing.
From nothing, to nothing. Are you trying to convince us that he was a good confidence artist?
Ken Lay caused misery. The money he helped to steal from all the people of California (with the help of a misguided Public Utilities Commission) could have dampened the state's economic recession - a problem blamed on politicians who had less power than Lay.
Ken Lay caused misery by believing that a nonfeeling, noncaring organization had the power to do good by free market principles. Ask all the people in Houston and elsewhere - people who were encouraged by Lay and Skilling to invest their retirement savings in a legal shell game named Enron stock.
I'm sure he was a nice guy. And I'm sure that he deserved to be held accountable in a more agonizing way - but it's some small solace that he spent his last few minutes on earth knowing that for a hundred years, people in the United States, from Atlanta to San Diego will curse his name.
Second, I have never though of being the child as a preacher as a necessary asset. A preacher asks for money in the name of god, not for the value of a direct service or product. There was a time when this was ok, like for a King or a Lord or something, where the sefs starved while one sat in a guilded highrise. But America now mostly knows that work is what brings wealth, and there is no cosmic cash machine. However, if one is raised on the principle of entitlement, then one might do anything to insure that entitlement.
Third, independent persons with knowledge knew Enron was bad juju. I myself was told by those in the know to stay away. It was not just that Enron was encoraging staff to buy Enron stock, almost every company was guilty of that practice. It was not just that Enron was booking and paying commission on sales that generated not positive cashflow. Again, that was a standard dot com practice. Rather, it was the products made no sense and there was no core direction. As was suspected before the fact, and known after, the products were shills of productivity.
In the end Ken Lay was nothing special except for his cluelessness and lack of humility. Many people realized he was simply incompetent, and would have accepted a statement of responsibility and an apology. Rather, he his behind technicalities and avoided the responsiblities that were ultimately his as the head of the enterprise.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I hope that god damn crook busts hell wide open.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
And the suckers mod him Insightful. Disclaimer: Yes I know Lay screwed a lot of people.
Read, refresh, repeat.
I am not sure if this has already been said on this thread, but I am already getting hints that the conspiricy freaks are saying he isn't really dead. He just faked his death so he could escape prison.
While I agree that ultimately they are responsible for that, Ken Lay was pushing for many ppl to invest more, while at the same time he was pulling his out AND lieing to them. Basically, he bushwhacked them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Breakfast served all day!
Bullshit! He's out of this country! Plain and simple.......
Reed Slatkin was also a $cientologist.
Fraudster and sucker, all wrapped up into one.
Fat lot of good it did him to accumulate all that money.... especially on the backs of other people..... Hope there's a special place in Hell for people like him .....or he comes back as a if you believe in that sort of thing (reincarnation)
"From now on I'm only going to associate with people that have demonic beady eyes and fresh blood dripping from their chin." I think I love you.
...and that they[work collegues] felt devoted to him.
...needed when ones business growth is to progress beyond stage three.
These devottees are otherwise known as faithfull lieutenants.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Damn fine parody, my friend!
Ahhh, c'mon people...he faked his death to avoid prison time. He's probably sun bathing in Venezuela by now. ;-)
What's Karma is when you have everything you worked your entire life to build destroyed before your eyes because you got greedy and stole a lot of people's money. Which was in the process when he died. I suspect that a large portion of the fortune he's leaving behind will go to the US Government instead of his surviving family.
Ken Lay fucked up the lives of a lot of people. Thousands of Enron ex-employees will not be able to retire thanks to his actions. I doubt those people will feel vindicated by his death. I suspect that there will be some very bitter Wal-mart greeters in the next 20 years. Even his heirs won't be on solid ground given the controversy over his fortune. I'd suggest striking his name from the history books except that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
... The corpse defecates on YOU!
Sunlight and visibility = good.
Sarbanes-Oxley = bad.
Fraud = already illegal.
Accounting practices = different for every company, every state, every nation.
Dog is my co-pilot.
...and he knew how to treat a lady.
Bemopolis
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
The ones who survive have to suffer
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I think I'll wait to see if netcraft can confirm this. I'm still a little gunshy from the whole *BSD thing.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
Who do you have to bribe in a podunk little town full of people you've known for a long time to fake your death? The guys at the morgue? The local police? Not hard for a guy with that much money and that much motive.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Give. Me. A. Break.
Working stiffs need to diversify their portfolio? Sure. How many 9-to-5ers do you think putting away $60 a paycheck had the wherewithal to take investing classes for their $10,000 retirement kitty? How many of them do you imagine had financial consultants on payrool?
Please. If I mug you the day you happen to have your laptop, iPod, cellphone, PSP, and engagement ring for your girlfriend on you, is it your fault? All those Cambodians get blamed because they put all of their eggs (i.e. their lives) in one basket by living in Cambodia?
Don't be an apologist stooge. It's unbecoming.
Ken Lay was a piece of shit. I couldn't care less if he blew sunshine up the ass of people who worked around him to make them think he was a great guy. Personally, I'm deeply saddened that the thieving fuck won't rot in jail the rest of his life like he fucking deserves. Of course, a better sentence would have been to put him in a room for 30 minutes with all the people he fucked over but that's of no avail now either. If it were up to me, I'd open a monument on his grave that invites people to come piss on it.
:)
Oh, and anyone who respected Ken Lay deserves to get pissed on too.
*anxiously awaits to get modded down*
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
I can't wait to hear Bush's comments on Lay's passing.
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
Stalin was not, and yet he killed 3x the no. of people Hitler did. what's your point ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Ugh! Right where I was planning to dance
My compliments!
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
Don't you all think that this is just a little too convenient. The man was facing possibly life in prison, which for a white collar crime is a huge sentence which he justly deserves, but he all of a sudden dies. Can you all say suicide? I knew that you could. Or wait maybe he is still alive and we will start having Ken Lay sitings at trailer-parks and Walmarts across America?
Large portions of Buffet's fortune derive from government bailouts of his insurance companies in the early days, don't they ? He would buy insurance companies, use the premiums to invest in more companies, and if a hurricane hit while his money was tied up, instead of selling his investments to pay the claims he'd get the government to bail him out with some cash or loans, right ? I have this on verbal authority, and see no mention of it on wikipedia, so if anyone can confirm or deny please respond.
more than lying, theft and fraud. And employees with stocks and stock options or the pension plan didn't get a choice to diversify their investments.
Wow you are cold-hearted. You're upset that someone at /. compared him to Ted Bundy, so instead of just disputing it you decided to be an ass and tear down the ex-employees of Enron. You should be sick of yourself. Not everyone knows Financial Planning 101.
Those ex-employees blame more people than Lay. Con-man do things knowing it will destroy peoples lifes and they don't care, that's what makes it more than a simple lie. You want to see how one lie ruined lifes then go talk to those whose lifes were ruined. It wasn't a simple lie, it was a huge con. Purposely blacking out power to raise your companies stock is more than a lie.
Can I bum a sig?
Not so clever. Fastow merely copied Microsoft's accounting techniques, as several other companies have, but he over-used them. For example: getting a certain sleezbag NC politician to add a sneaky addemdum to an omnibus bill that would require the IRS to "refund" Microsoft every time an employee cashed in stock options given them to them by Microsoft in liou of cash.
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rul
Corporations pay taxes on their own income (generally 35%), but money they pay out in salaries to employees is deductible from the corporation's income. Since granting options to employees results in taxable income to those employees, Microsoft gets to deduct that taxable employee income from its own taxable corporate income, and that's where Microsoft got a tax-free $3.1 billion in cash in fiscal 1999: "Stock option income tax benefits."
Net result: The EMPLOYEE was TAXED when they exercised the option and YOU ended up paying for the development of Microsoft's applications, and Microsoft didn't have payroll deductions, state or federal income tax payments, or FICA shares. Pure profit, against which HONESTLY run companies had to unfairly compete.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
He dies before sentencing, Now we have no yardstick for similar crooks in the future, no order of restitution to be paid. Inheritance gets whatever he had left + life insurance benefits (which I bet is a pretty good chunk of any state budget)
A Republican friend of mine mockingly said "How dare he die before we get a chance to punish him." What he say in jest, I say in earnest.
Personally, I would have liked to see him live a long, long, long life breaking rocks in the hot sun. Since he probably would have ended up at Club Fed, I hope it hurt a tenth as much as losing your retirement and life savings overnight.
As an Atheist, I get no satisfaction from him keeling over. I literally feel robbed, and I had no money in their company. The people who did probably feel robbed all over again.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
...vacationing in Aspen
I understand this is news and should be reported, but why on /.? As the place for "news for nerds", where is the nerd factor?
So a rich guy who did some bad things died because he ate too many Big Macs (or the Ruth's Chris version)...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/01/25/enron.suicid e/n ews/main505845.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/04/10/evening
Hahaha! You can't stop the conspiracy theory!! Poor old Vice Chairman Clifford Baxter had integrity and didn't like the what went down at Enron.. guess it got to him back in 2002.. and he killed himself. Just before investigators could speak with him.
Hehehehehee!!
P.S. I'm convinced there's a conspiracy surround why no one had mentioned this yet..
Guy makes a ton of money...
Ruins people's lives...
And now he dies a martyr, and has 72 virgins waiting for him!
All that evil built up in his bones and then suddenly, he had to reboot.
Smile.
Just minutes before Lays heartattack, Prez Bush called him up and stated that he wouldn't be able to pardon him in 2008. His spot was taken by Saddam.
Can I bum a sig?
I'm reasonably confident that we would not have needed to release anyone from jail to put Ken Lay in jail while he awaited sentencing. If we would have to let someone out, I'm sure we could find a nonviolent person who was arrested for possesion of marijuana. It sounds like your friend's husband needs to be in jail, but that has nothing to do with this.
My other sig is extremely clever...
Don't you need a heart to have a heart attack?
After what he and his cronies did I didn't think they had a whole one between them.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
And this makes it his fault how? If I go to Hong Kong and someone sells me a 'Rolex', does that make it their fault? Personally, I don't have much problem with people preying on the chronically stupid. Of course he's a bad bad man, but I'd like you to show me any broker that doesn't push the stocks he's paid to push, whether or not they're in the best interests of their clients' portfolio.
There are plenty of pump and dump scammers out there, idiots are ruined by them every day. Do they get major media coverage? The fact that Lay was a high-ranking employee of a major corporation is beside the point, IMO. All he did was swindle money out of people who would probably have had that money swinded out of them some other way.
It reminds me of the saying... "A fool and his money are soon parted."
What about Mr. Bill?
Large numbers of companies, including Enron, forced their employees to keep large portions of (if not all of) their retirement portfolios in 401K's invested in Company Stock.
If you aren't allowed to diversify, it's appropriate to blame the bigwig fraudulent CEO for ruining your retirement. And that's exactly what happened here.
... that Ken Lay isn't going to be Bubba's prison bitch for the next decade.
In that case more people would be hurt less hard. In financial terms, the loss stays the same. Thousands upon thousands if not more were affected by this. Ted Bundy certainly did not have as much impact. I hate it when these kind of leeches don't get what they deserve. With all that power and priveledges should come an enourmous amount of responsability. I've known scores upon scores of people that are very nice to be around. This generally does not make a good person. The biggest devils wear the biggest smiles.
Is he REALLY dead?
Most of his cash "vanished" shortly before his arrest, and his assets were never frozen.
When Lay collapsed, his personal assistant called Lay's personal doctor, not an ambulance. It was Lay's personal physician who pronounced Lay dead.
Lay's will, revised just a couple of months ago, calls for his cremation, and his widow was out of the country when he died. She's reportedly having medical complications from "The shock of her belove husband's sudden death." As a result, she's not expected to return to the states for the funeral.
Details on who signed the death certificate are fuzzy, but there are no plans for an autopsy. He's scheduled for cremation tomorrow morning.
Any bets there's no actual body in the casket, or if there is, it's not Ken Lay's?
Billions are now being spent nationwide by American CEOs on similar contingency plans for faking one's own death and moving vast financial resources to a safe location out of the country.
Ken Lay has become quite a roll model for Corporate CEOs all over the country. He made a vast fortune, and despite being caught, manged to keep a large number of his cohorts from facing any real repercussions while escaping with his own fortune largely intact.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
PMITA = Pound Me In The Ass (prison)
In other words, the kind of prison where you're likely going to end up real "intimate" with some guy named "Avocado," not the typical country-club style prison that most of the rich and famous get to go to.
Well said, and likely to a large degree correct.
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
Just off the top of my head, It seems to me that you actually have guys named Sarbanes and Oxely to thank for having to live with Sarbanes-Oxely.
In regards to his appeal, he was heard saying, "If I'm lying, I'm dieing." And then, with a heavy heart... well, y'know the story.
I'm like a superhero, but with no powers or motivation.
And Hitler was just killing jews who would eventually die of old age anyhow.
Jeremy
I hope any potentially larcenous executives out there realize that the penalty for being caught, shamed, and convicted of being a criminal can be death when you are Ken's age (even down into the 50's really).
Ken could have avoided this fate. If he had managed enron well or just got the hell out of dodge if he couldn't, he would probably be alive and very happy today.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Hindsight is 20/20, isn't it? Well, people have been saying "don't put all your eggs in one basket" for centuries, but people still do it. Of course, not nearly so many people do now as did before the Enron scandal. That is when it truly came to light that it was not a good idea to invest in your place of business. So I for one, don't blame the victims. I blame the ones who victimized them.
As an aside, the company I most recently worked for only recently (after I left) gave employees a choice as to what their 401k match went into. When I was there, your only choice was company stock.
I know people who lost hundreds of thousands due to other people's lies and mismanagement. My father worked for Lucent and lost a huge amount of money. He was diversified, so didn't lose everything, but hundreds of thousand remain hundreds of thousands even if you don't lose everything. I lost hundreds of thousands due to Dennis Kozlowski's lies. I'm still bitter even though I was somewhat diversified.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Well that does it! No more hanging around polite charming people for me.
/.
That's why I hang around
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
I hate to sound like a prick...But maybe the thought of prison sex put him over the edge. After seing Enron:The smartest men in the room; I can't feel sorry for his passing. He has caused many people grief. Karma, it seems, always has the last say.
The fortune(8) footer that appeared at the end of the comments section seems all too fitting: "Dishonor will not trouble me, once I am dead. -- Euripides"
If you don't know what you're doing, do it neatly.
When I recently visited the Houston Museum of Natural Science (for the Body Worlds travelling exhibit -- cool!), I noticed that their Hall of the Americas included Ken and Linda Lay as contributors. You don't see it on the website -- in fact, Google doesn't show any instances of his name on the hmns.org site at all -- but up at the Americas exhibit, there's a big, glowing sign proclaiming the Lay family's generosity.
I wondered at the time whether they just hadn't gotten around to applying the duct tape, like they did at Enron Field, since renamed to something more wholesome. But now that we* can look back and say "Aw, poor schmuck", maybe the HMNS and the other museums that benefitted from Lay's largesse can put the duct tape away for good.
* "we": For values of "we" that don't include Enron shareholders as of late 2001.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Wow you are cold-hearted. You're upset that someone at /. compared him to Ted Bundy, so instead of just disputing it you decided to be an ass and tear down the ex-employees of Enron.
I wouldn't say I'm "upset" but I'm definitely disappointed. This is nothing more than Goodwin's law, slightly modified. Ken Lay is a bad man. We all agree. Why bring Ted Bundy into this?
I wouldn't say that I'm "tearing down" the ex-employees of Enron either. I'm pointing out that they aren't 100% innocent and responsibility-free in all this. Don't be so binary.
You should be sick of yourself.
Well, I'm sick to my stomach with a culture in which people are always looking to blame someone else for their problems. Does that count?
Not everyone knows Financial Planning 101.
That's true. Children don't. These people are adults. Part of being an adult is taking precautions to reduce the likelihood of disaster.
You want to see how one lie ruined lifes then go talk to those whose lifes were ruined.
As I stated in my original post, I do feel sorry for these people. But that doesn't mean I have to portray them as completely helpless individuals who had no role in the disaster that befell them.
It wasn't a simple lie, it was a huge con. Purposely blacking out power to raise your companies stock is more than a lie.
A con is a lie. Was it a "simple" lie? Who cares! It was a lie. It doesn't compare to butchering or bludgeoning someone.
GMD
watch this
what Other Reasons could there be to not increase corporate financial accountability?
The down-side to Sarbox is that it massively increases accouting burden and raises the bar in terms of funds and overhead required for any small company to go public. This both reduces the benefits of going public and limits the IPO opportunity to larger, better funded corporations, at the expense of many more interesting younger companies. It puts the opportunity further out of reach of smaller entreprenuers.
Most venture investors and entreprenuers feel that Sarbox goes too far. You seem to be speaking strictly from the perspective of a (rather uninformed) public shareholder, and frankly you seem to lack the necessary insight into the costs of Sarbox compliance to form a balanced viewpoint. Increasing penalties for (and actually enforcing) SEC rules would have gone a long way without having to add new requirements.
Yeah I don't think comparing him to Ted Bundy is warranted either. If he did do what he was convicted of, then it was worse than lying, but its not murder. And to the people commenting on your cold heartedness. I kind of agree with you actually. People DO need to diversify. I understand that pension plans are tied to company performance, but you don't need a fscking college degree to know you need to have options in case the worse should happen. Shit you can't turn on the TV without seeing an advertisement "educating" about the need for diversification. I feel for these people, I really do. It sucks and its completely not fair that their lives were destroyed by someone elses greed, but COME ON people. THINK BEFORE you blindly put your money into the company line. Maybe cut a little out from the money you put into the pension funds and put it somewhere else. Its not THAT difficult to figure out. You don't need to know the stock market to put money into an investment vehicle. Thats just common sense. Hell I'm not an economist and i'm not rich by any means but I still do my research and talk to people I know when I make a major financial decision like investments, etc. Its just good advice. My .02
There you people go again, with your horrible analogies. When Hitler scooped up Jews (and homosexuals and the infirm and pretty much anyone else he didn't like) and ploped them down into death camps, they didn't have much choice in the matter. I can choose to do my research before I put my money into a stock that doesn't exist. I can choose not to buy stuff from the back of some guy's van down an alley in New York. The people at Enron could chose to diversify (God knows you can't watch TV for ten minutes without some commercial or other telling you to) instead of putting all their eggs in one basket, then soaking up the media attention with their sob stories.
I'm not defending what Lay, or any other con-man does, but there comes a point when you have to accept personal responsibility for making stupid choices. This is something Amercians are not very good at.
* We had to change from domain per plant to one common domain.
* Passwords have very strict rules. (90 days, complex, 60 days if superuser)
* Lots of training.
* Tons more paperwork for accouting.
* Very strict rules about where you ship for a customer.
* all the cost is pasted onto the customer.
* etc., etc., etc.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Here's a simple question: Who ruined more lives? Ken Lay or Ted Bundy?
It's all Krista's Fault.
This doesn't excuse accounting fraud, but anyone that lost their entire life savings on Enron invested very foolishly. There's a reason why you are supposed to diversify.
The *employees* thought they were going to get rich quick?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You remember the burly brawl from Matrix Reloaded? The scene where Neo flies off and all the agent Smiths are just kinda standing around looking generally disappointed and perplexed?
Welcome to the world of the Ken Lay prosecution team.
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
He didn't destroy the livelihood of scores of people; they did that to themselves.
What? Have you not paid attention to anything going on? The employees lost everything because they were not allowed to divest their interests from Enron into other areas to spread out their risk. Basically their employer would not allow them any leeway in such measures and not to mention loosing all your retirment and benefits that you worked so long and hard to get.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It's the cost of compliance that is so bad. If you are a huge company, say Exxon, with its $10 Billion quarterly profit, then you can afford to pay for the accountants, lawyers, IT auditors, and others needed to assure compliance. I would guess that Exxon pays $10M/quarter for this, about $0.1% of their profits. But if you are a software company with $25M in annual revenue and maybe $2M in annual profit before taxes, with hopes of going public, then the cost of SarbOx compliance makes it nearly impossible to do so. It's hard to spend less than $500K annually and satisfy the SarbOx requirements. For a small company, this amounts to at least 25% of earnings, which reduces the likely value of their stock, since investors tend to focus on price/earnings ratios. I was told that SarbOx was an important reason why JBoss decided to be acquired rather than try to go public on their own.
It's now occupied by Kenneth Lay.
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
Good point, how can anyone say he was evil?
I disagree. Putting him in jail for life is incarceration, not rehabilitation, and does diddly squat for all the people he harmed. I think accountants and auditors should've gone over his financial records and penalized him all the money he made during his time at Enron, plus another, oh, say, $50mil, and put all that money into a fund split up among the people who were screwed over by his selfishness. Plus five years in jail and, most importantly, a five-ten year parole in which he was prevented from being an officer of any corporation or member of the board of directors of any corporation. Take away his livelihood, like he did to other people, keep him from doing more damage, and repay, as best possible, some fraction of the people whom his actions affected.
Nobody should get more time in prison for cooking the books (or for copyright infringement) than a person who murders. Criminal penalties should fit the crime. But so should the financial penalties, and his financial crimes were large indeed.
I'd say the same thing about Skilling and the world.com people, while I'm at it. Hit them where it hurts: get them working at McDonalds to make their car payments, and use their ill-gotten gains to help those they harmed.
Consider it a different version of "an eye for an eye": their punishment is to supply from what they have, what they've made another lose. Which, by the way, is what I believe "an eye for an eye" originally was intended to do: if you blind someone, you must then act as that person's eyes.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
he grew this whole company, Enron, from nothing.
*singing*
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing... woooo-ooooo
Working stiffs need to diversify their portfolio? Sure. How many 9-to-5ers do you think putting away $60 a paycheck had the wherewithal to take investing classes for their $10,000 retirement kitty? How many of them do you imagine had financial consultants on payrool?
Diversification is not some advanced financial concept that requires taking investing classes and you know it.
Please. If I mug you the day you happen to have your laptop, iPod, cellphone, PSP, and engagement ring for your girlfriend on you, is it your fault? All those Cambodians get blamed because they put all of their eggs (i.e. their lives) in one basket by living in Cambodia?
I have no say in whether you mug me or not. The people living in Cambodia have no say in whether they can move or not (because they are too poor to move). The people who lost their life savings -- I'm not saying those who lost any money, I'm talking about those who lost everything -- did have a say in whether this would happen to them. If Ken Lay had forced everyone to put all their money in Enron stock at gunpoint, then you'd have a case. And please, don't tell me about how Enron's 401(k) plan required them to buy Enron stock. If that's the case, then you have to get some investments outside your 401(k) plan, even if the company won't match those funds. That was my original point. These people looked at what would get them the most money in the short term and ignored one of the basic tenets of financial management.
Don't be an apologist stooge. It's unbecoming.
I'm not. Kenneth Lay was a bad man. He was not a serial killer, however, and the people who got hurt by the scam must accept some responsibility for their actions.
GMD
watch this
"Who cares! It was a lie. It doesn't compare to butchering or bludgeoning someone."
Unless you are President Clinton, then you get impeached.. And which side of the line did you stand on that issue, I wonder...
"But this one goes to 11!"
God called. He wants to know where his pension is.
It's all Krista's Fault.
because they're deluded by their own success into believing that they can pull off just about anything, and even in their darkest hour, they've got a plan for wriggling out and turning things around
You mean like faking your own death? And enjoying the rest of your life on an island in Fiji with over 100 million in secret bank accounts?
Seriously, its what I'd do if I was him.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The trouble is that Sarbanes-Oxley puts restrictions on law abiding citizens never implicated in crimes.
I mean, we all want to stop rape, right? How about we make a law requiring you to provide your DNA to a government database so they can catch rapists. After all, if you are not a rapist, what do you have to worry about?
We all want to stop illegal drugs from harming people. How about we have random drug testing for all citizens. The police will select random names from a voting database or DMV records or something, and give them all drug tests. If you test postive, you go to jail. If you don't take the test, you go to jail. Sound reasonable?
We all want to stop terrorism. How about requiring that police search every residence once a month. Nothing harmfull with that, you have nothing to worry about if you are not a terrorist, right?
While there is nothing wrong with creating laws to punish people guilty of theft and fraud, there are big problems with creating a system where everyone must prove their innocence on a regular basis or be considered guilty. Especially, like in the Sarbanes-Oxley, it is a series of vauge rules that are very difficult to comply with and can be arbitrarily enforced. This is more fodder for the government to go after it's critics, or to demand political donations as protection money for non-enforcement, or to help a company with political connections by going after it's competitor, and the fixed costs of compliance help keep smaller buisnesses with competing with large corporations. It is not going to stop this kind of corporate crime, it is just another tool for the government to aid certain corporate criminals, and harrass other people they don't like.
Dude! You miss the point. That's called "trickle down economics."
At least! We are finaly seeing some progress on the war of terrorism.
I suppose you have a point here, comparing Ken Lay to a serial killer MIGHT be stretching it, but I don't think it's that far off. Lay profited by ripping off thousands of customers and employees while CONTINUALLY lying about it just so he would stay rich. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing and he CHOSE to keep screwing people over in order to add to his fortune. He was a major part of one of the most corrupt companies in our history and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act will continue to provide headaches for many, many honest businesses who have never done a thing wrong. In short, Lay made his own bed. Bundy, on the other hand, was a sociopath (correct me if I'm wrong) who raped and murdered dozens of women. Now, I AM NOT CONDONING his actions, but his mental state had a lot more to do with his crimes than choice did (again, I AM NOT USING THAT AS AN EXCUSE). One destroyed lives as secretly as possible, the other ended lives as intimately as possible. Both deserve our scorn (but not necessarily our wishes of death). I'm not sorry either are dead, but I do not wish it upon them. Sometimes it's OKAY to speak ill of the dead.
Think about it again.
Citation here
Due to his untimely demise, an important point is that he was never given the opportunity to exhaust his appeals options (which would have begun after his sentencing in September), and thus, the conviction will be abated. The unfortunate thing is that he died prior to the conclusion of this process, and it's terrible that his estate probably won't suffer monetary consequences--at least from criminal proceedings--because of this, but I'd rather live in a country where that's the case than the alternative, in which there is no appeals process.
--- What
Most criminals are charming and polite also. How would they con you out of your hard earned money and leave you feeling wanting more.
Its a trick ..... Get an AXE!
Unless you are President Clinton, then you get impeached.. And which side of the line did you stand on that issue, I wonder...
Why do you wonder? Why does it matter?
I know what you're thinking: I'm a die-hard Republican who loves money above all else. That's why I'm "defending" Kenneth Lay (which I'm not -- I'm simply pointing out that he's no serial killer). Turns out I have never voted Republican -- and probably never will -- in my entire life. Yup, it's possible to be social liberal and still wish people would exercise some personal responsbility. Pretty radical, huh?
GMD
watch this
"The reason why these people ignored this bedrock of finance is because Enron's stock once did quite well."
7 /401k/index.html?pn=2/
If I remember correctly, employees were "encouraged" to show their loyalty by investing a lot of their 401k's in Enron.
Also:
"Enron limited employees' investment freedom from the start by matching their contributions only with company stock and by preventing employees from selling that stock until age 50."
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/01/1
Unless you are President Clinton, then you get impeached.. And which side of the line did you stand on that issue, I wonder...
What does that have to do with anything except trying to inflame a political flame war? Go away, troll.
dsgitl: How many of them do you imagine had financial consultants on payrool?
e ginvest/markettiming.htm
Edward Jones. Costs me $30/year for my IRA. The kid's college fund is covered by the fund loads (and yes, loads can be better for long term investing). The money market pays me.
They're like the Starbucks of investing, there's one on every bloody corner and my rep has stayed late to explain things like diversification to me.
And I've got friends who worked for Enron, they got suckered. They do have to take some of the blame. Not all of it, for sure, but if they listened to financial advice that was readily available if they'd looked for it (and cheap, too!), they might not have gotten taken so badly.
http://www.fool.com/seminars/partners/resources/b
The Motley Fool is a good place to start if you just can't bring yourself to walk in to Ed Jones, Smith Barney, Fidelity, Chase, or any decent CPA's office.
I find it ironic that the crook dies, and this is the current quote at the bottom of /. :::
Dishonor will not trouble me, once I am dead. -- Euripides
(I wonder if this will be modded Insigthful, or Interesting... god forbid it's Funny)
The vast majority of people are scumbags, and we don't kill all of them or cheer as their families prepare for funerals, becuase that would make us little shits like you.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
That is why you will never get anywhere in life.
But have fun in the basement of your Mom's house if you see her when you pop upstairs for another Hot Pocket be sure to tell her the gang says "Hi!"
I told u I was hardcore.
Completely off topic, but I got the biggest laugh at your name, I remember that dude from the 80s heavy metal.
A con is a lie. Was it a "simple" lie? Who cares! It was a lie. It doesn't compare to butchering or bludgeoning someone. A friend of mine lied to me the other day, but I didn't end up losing my lifes savings. It does matter the complexity of the lie. Don't simplify Lays actions. You know those people that Bundy killed it was partially their fault. As adults they should have been more aware that there are killers out there willing to hurt people. See how cold your logic sounds.
Can I bum a sig?
Oh my God! You're so right.
/sarcasm
Corrupt Republicans aren't a problem, because you know, the Democrats we elect to replace them might also be corrupt. So we should just look the other way and mind our own business.
Then again, there are us reasonable sorts who upon seeing corruption vote the bums out, regardless of party.
What? Have you not paid attention to anything going on? The employees lost everything because they were not allowed to divest their interests from Enron into other areas to spread out their risk.
It's not like he held a gun to their head and told them "If I find out you have ever point one dollar into another investment -- including a Savings account or a home -- I will end your life!"
You always have a choice. ALWAYS! If your employer doesn't condone diversification, then you do it outside your retirement account. Or hell, maybe you quit that company and find a better employer. This is the same blog where people routinely advise each other to quit if their boss won't let them install Linux on their desktop, but now everyone is going on about who these people had no choice but to follow Grand Sky Marshall Lay's edicts. Sheesh!
GMD
watch this
It's sarcasm. As in "I could care less.... if I really, really tried".
Ok, I'll break it down for you. Some of the same people defending Ken Lay, saying "all he did was lie" and it wasn't a big deal are the same people who wanted Clinton impeached for the exact same offense. Would have thought that it was pretty obvious.... If you think the Ken Lay discussion isn't a political one, who is being naive now??
"But this one goes to 11!"
If I put goatse on google.com, how many people's lives have I ruined? Thing is, even though he damaged more lives than the other guy, you could say he did less damage to each (depends on your priorities and needs in this capitalist society: no money-no life?)
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Kenneth Lay was obviously not a great humanitarian but comparing him to one of the most notorious serial killers in history is a bit much.
No it isn't. A sociopath is a sociopath is a sociopath. Bundy did worse crimes to fewer people, Lay did lesser crimes to *millions*.
Their utter lack of conscience is identical. Their willingless to fuck anyone and everyone for their own desires is identical.
I grow a bit weary of hearing ex-Enron employees wail about how their life-savings are gone thanks to Lay. These poor people need to accept a bit of responsibility for their mess. You never invest all your money in a single company. Diversification is simple Financial Planning 101.
Yes, but Lay refused to let the employees sell their stock while he was dumping his like mad.
That's the crime of a subhuman scumbag with none of the feelings that a real whole human being has.
And please spare me the responses about how I'm being cold-hearted. I feel for these people.
Then why are you defending a person who knows nothing about those feelings except how to use them against others?
But placing all the blame on one man and comparing him to Ted Bundy sickens me. It's just another example of our victimization culture.
Oh the fuck it is. He *is* more like Bundy than he is like a normal functioning human being. Smart, stupid, greedy, kind ignorant, or what have you, we all have feelings. Monsters like Bundy and Lay do not even have them. They can recognize them well enough to use them to prey upon people, but they do not even really understand what they are.
Get some persepective and quit defending an amoral subhuman monster.
"Yup, it's possible to be social liberal and still wish people would exercise some personal responsbility. Pretty radical, huh?"
Yes, completely radical. If the US wasn't so completely a two part system, I would suggest that you run for office (although your base of personally responsible social liberals probably wouldn't be overwhelming...)
"But this one goes to 11!"
From what I've read of him, Ken had several flaws:
If Ken Lay was as described above, then he was a fraud. He fraudulenty presented himself as executive material.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
PUBLIC CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE!!!!11!!!!
Any metaphor drawn from that cloth is fundamentally flawed.
The "innocence" you say must be proved is, in reality, reports on how much money the corporation has/owes/and is owed. As these numbers HUGELY influence how real people invest their own money, it is requisite for our entire system of finance that these numbers be accurate and trusted.
SOX might be a bit onerous, but that's only because things had become so lax....and Lay was the perfect example of how they were so lax that CEO's could try and argue in court they had no idea how much the company has/owes/and is owed.
I'll not touch your liberaltarian ranting that follows...I hear they're infectious.
+&x
Fer Chrissakes, can anyone here tell me whether or not Generalissimo Franco is still dead?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Duhhh. Isn't that what all laws and regulations do? It's basically saying, "We think that you're a law-abiding citizen, but we don't want you to do X. In fact, we don't want you to do X so much that, if you do X, here's what we're going to do to you."
Everybody is law-abiding until they break the law. And, after they pay their debt to society, they're law abiding again (unless they break the law again).
Or do you want anarchy?
That is all.
From what I've understood, it was meant to define the limit of rightfull punishment. If someone pokes your eye out, you may poke his, but you may not kill him. You may, of course, refrain from taking revenge or take less severe revenge (say, hit him on the stomach with our fist); but if you do take revenge, taking an eye for eye is the worst you are allowed to do. Acting as his eyes would be analogous to paying damages, not being punished. So, "an eye for an eye" was meant to stop the vicious circle of escalating revenge.
Of course this still basically agrees with the other parts of your post: taking away the property of a conman who destroyed other people's life savings and forcing him to live off his own labor is a fitting punishment.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
And nothing in the "convoluted the energy regulations and restrictions" in the country requires the construction of hundreds of off-balance sheet offshore subsidiaries to hide debt in. If you want to argue whether Ken Lay was ignorant of the accounting fraud that is represented by those subsidiaries, I guess despite the guilty verdict you might have a reasonable argument. But your claim seems to suggest that the real problem with Enron was energy regulations, and it's entirely clear that Enron did in fact commit securities fraud on an industrial scale.
I'm a nature photographer.
For a man who caused a LOT of problems for a lot of people, and that he had much information on others who are under then gun, is it entirely possible his death is not a coincidence? There have been too many coincidences in the past with scandals for this to be accepted as a natural death. Powerful and rich people gained before the downfall of Enron (like Rockefeller), and now the chief witness is dead. Hmmmm.
> For a small company, this amounts to at least 25% of earnings,
Exactly! The Democrats whole-heartedly supported Sarbanes-Oxley just for that reason. It has put companies out of business, and it has cost a lot of jobs. It's one of the worst anti-business laws passed in the past 50 years.
According to Financial Executives International (FEI), small companies ($50B yearly). SOX compliance is extremely expensive especially for smaller public companies. At my last employer the SOX audit took almost 5,000 hours at over $200/hour. We were a private company planning to go public so the SEC recommended the audit despite it not being legally required. That was over a million thrown away for no purpose.
This ridiculous SOX clause put almost 200 people out of work in the last company I worked for:
> Ban on most personal loans to any executive officer or director
There's nothing wrong with loans if properly supervised. We had a Catch-22 in that our entire management team moved to the area in early 2002 with sign-on bonuses in the form of no interest loans to help pay for their moves and downpayments on new homes. In order to go public we would have had to have every one of them pay back 100% of the loans. Since most of them could not afford to do so, we had to either fire them (and then they probably would have never paid the loan!) or not go public. We choose the second option. Since the entire business plan was based upon going public as we knew would probably happen, we ran out of money.
The sad thing is the affect we had on the small town we were in. The median houshold income in this city is $37,400, but we were paying an average of over $58k to those 200 people put out of work by SOX. When you included wives and children, that was almost 700 people that lost their income in a town of about 11,000. It also left the nicest office building in the city about 75% empty, and that space is still sitting unused.
The only thing that survived was a small part of the company that executes a couple of small, but profitable, contracts.
First off, stop making shit up. Where exactly have people been saying "I hate Clinton, but what Lay did was A-OK!"? Right, noplace. You're just making unfounded assumptions. Bringing a 10-year-old political debate into this one won't illuminate anything. All you're trying to do is start a flame war. So again, go away troll.
If you think the Ken Lay discussion isn't a political one, who is being naive now??
This Ken Lay discussion isn't. It's a moral and ethical one. If you want debates where everything has to be drug through the political shitter, try http://www.moveon.org/.
he Ken Lay memorial urinal has a nice ring to it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Whilst suppliers and shareholders have undoubtedly been 'hurt' financially Enron's collapse, die-hard Kiyosaki 'E' types have learned a hard lesson here.
/. ers, though I sometimes wonder) are too naive to fully appreciate the balances any government must strike when running a country, so the degree of bullshit is, or was until the last few years, understandable.
Undoubtedly many people have had their financial plans left in tatters, which is disgraceful, however it also emphasises the fact that we should all take greater responsibility for our own finances. Engaging yourself in 'employment' (PAYE here, I know the US has an equivalent) is actually a very, very risky business, for several reasons:
1. You rarely, if ever, develop important life (economic and political) skills outside of your narrowly defined role.
2. Not having these skills means you'll struggle to run and market your own business should you want to.
3. You have no control over business decisions taken by your employer which may put your own interests at risk.
4. Many employees - usually, though not exclusively, older ones believe in a number of fantasies, notably that the company can always afford to pay them more (they *know* this without even a rudimentary understanding of finance or accounting), that their company 'pension' is guaranteed (they always seem surprised when a company suddenly announces that its ponzi scheme is siphoning off so much income that they have to stop 'investing' in it lest they go under) and that - at least here - the government will pay their way should all else fail.
I appreciate point 4 is longwinded, however, if you are determined to spend 40+ years of your life in environments staffed by those with an 'employee' mentality, then you too run the risk of believing in their fantasies. Underlying this, however, is the schooling system in both the US and UK, determined as it is to prepare our good citizens for life in the 19th century. If you really want to limit damage from Enron-esque disasters, then teach people en masse how to steer their own financial course instead of depending on a 'jobby' (ala Billy Connolly) and government.
As for Sarbox, its high time that internal operations were made more transparent to potential investors. Afterall, monopoly product or not, significant systems weaknesses and failures can wipe out even the richest corporations. Barings Bank anyone?
Anyway, everybody should have sympathy for those who don;t really have enough time left to prepare to retire now. Those responsible for this debacle richly deserve their jail time. Its just a shame that the same principle doesn't apply to politicians who mislead their people, though most (not
2% tied-in annuities?
You might as well keep your money under the mattress - factoring in liquidity and current inflation, its probably a better investment....
Much of the Enron stock the employees got had all these strings attached designed to make it hard to sell and diversify.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I hate Clinton, but what Lay did was A-OK!
Have a quick Google for Ernest Saunders and the Guiness fraud scandal.
Mr. Saunders was let out of prison early because he was suffering from Alzheimers. He miraculously recovered once he was free.
No way he was a monster. he believed the same hype we all did for a while. remember, there was a time when being considered profitable was just as good as being profitable.
Enron was a great company. They really did rule the world for a while. I know. I live in Houston, and Enron were everywhere and in everything. They made a lot of stupid mistakes, but had a lot of profitable businesses. Without that stupid fucking accounting system and lazy analysts, Enron might still be around today ruling the world.
I think 5 or 10 years from now, after SOX is repealed and replaced with something a little less insane, we will look back and wonder how we managed to do business with all these restrictions. It is so costly to follow SOX, the only people making money in America these days are the consultants and auditors.
Don't slam the employees though, they were restricted in ways that should make us all sit up and take notice.
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
It seems to me that you are making a whole lot of assumptions, some that are verifiably false. For instance, no, not everyone knows about diversification of a portfolio. In fact, I guarantee you that there are a LOT of people that dont even know what a portfolio is. My father, for instance. So, right there, you are wrong.
On your second point, claiming that everyone who had everything invested in Enron was greedy, I am completely dumbfounded that someone could actually think that. Here is a concept, more than likely most of them just didn't know any better. Most of them probably actually trusted the people that ran their company, and more than likely most of them are products of an age when companies often did care about their employees.
Try not to be so shocked that not everyone is as all knowing as yourself. In fact, since you know everything, you should have already KNOWN this!
"Let him rot in prison," is usually just a figure of speech, but in this case...
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
All you're trying to do is start a flame war.
Which apparently, you are feeding.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Duhhh. Isn't that what all laws and regulations do? It's basically saying, "We think that you're a law-abiding citizen, but we don't want you to do X. In fact, we don't want you to do X so much that, if you do X, here's what we're going to do to you."
It is one thing to say "you can't do this, or you will be punished", but another thing to say "even if you are innocent, you must prove that you are innocent using the means we specify, otherwise you will be punished as if you are guilty".
You are ignoring the questions I asked. The government wants to stop rape. It demands all citizens must give a DNA sample to a government database. If you don't give a sample, you will be assumed to be guilty of rape (after all, why would you have a problem giving a DNA sample if you are not a rapist). Would you have a problem with a law like that? Well, SOX is the same thing, except the way you prove your innocence under SOX is a convoluted system that only lawyers and accountants that specialize in such things kinda understand.
Or do you want anarchy?
In our society that is rapidly becoming totalitarian, nearly everything that isn't totalitarian will appear anarchist by contrast.
When an employee asked during a company meeting whether having most of his (her?) savings in Enron was a smart thing to do, the management spokewoman could have advised diversification. Instead she made it clear that Enron was where their money should be, all the while making a big joke about it.
I accept your point that employees take responsibility for their actions. They should have no more legal claims than other investors for the fall of Enron stock.
But by encouraging employees to stay undiversified, Enron management compounded their criminal culpability.
I say we resurrect him.
Then we stomp him.
Then we tattoo him.
Then we hang him.
Then we kill him.
Who, eulogizes for the, english language, which is so, often, abused with the random, placement of, commas?
Also, I don't think Ted Bundy walked away with $500 million shared between him and his 'mates' in liquid assets and stock. Only if Bundy's life had been increased by his crimes then could he be seriously compared to Lay. I think the original poster is doing Bundy a great injustice.
Well that does it! No more hanging around polite charming people for me.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I do not like overly polite, charming males (I'm a male, BTW).
To me, something is creepy about them, and yes, many psychopaths are polite, charming people. The other quality of many psychopaths (a different subset than the polite, charming ones) is that they are "cutetsy".
Also, FWIW, Bundy was praised at the conviction of his trial by the judge (Bundy represented himself) as being a very competent lawyer.
Responsi-what?
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation
"A corporation is a legal person which, while being composed of natural persons, exists completely separately from them. This separation gives the corporation unique powers which other legal entities lack. The extent and scope of its status and capacity is determined by the law of the place of incorporation."
I'm not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with your views on SOX. I am just noting that a Corporation is a legal person.
Currently you are modded Flamebait, yet you are the one who accurately called the situation. Go figure!
damaged by dogma
After moving to a better hospital, his condition was upgraded to "alive".
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I can not even imagine what section this should be listed under?
The man is dead. Odds are his family loved him and his friends will miss. What I don't understand is what value any of these comments on Slashdot have?
What good is this mans death? Will it get anyone their money back? Will it prevent him from doing it again? Will it cause anything but pain too his family?
The man took money through bad accounting practices. He didn't murder anyone.
Maybe people more people should adopt the motto, "Do nothing that doesn't help?"
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
PUBLIC CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE!!!!11!!!!
No, but people go to jail if they don't comply with SOX. People ARE people. And people are going to be sent to jail, not because they lied about how much money their company mankes, but because they can't prove that they didn't lie about how much money their company makes.
People should NEVER, EVER, EVER, have to prove their innocence! That is not the way laws are supposed to work! Innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be how the law works, even for people who work for comporations!
I'll not touch your liberaltarian ranting that follows...I hear they're infectious.
You won't touch my "libertarian ranting" because you know it is true, and there is no arguement you can make. Overly complicated and overly vauge regulation, which is open to widely different interpretations, leads to a situation where the law can be used to harrass people for political reasons. And trust me, it is not going to be the "Big Evil Corporations" who are going to be the ones stung. You are living in a country where the Patriot Act is being used as a tool to go after local drug dealers, and the RICO act is being used to convict people in absentia for running online casinos IN COUNTRIES WHERE IT IS PERFECTLY LEGAL! You know damn well that the government is going to have a field day with this, and lots of people are going to go to jail on some SOX technicality after they speak out against the president, or donate a lot of money to the losing candidate in an election, or when the president decides to reward a friends company by taking out the competition (ever hear of Halburton?).
I love a good conspiracy theory so how about this, Ken Lay whacked because he was going to talk about Cheneys "energy meetings" to get a reduced sentence.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
..... RIH
He was just born in the wrong culture.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
..yah and the police screwed up a lot of the crime scene.
My point, basically, is that it's certainly much better than some freak looking at kiddy porn.
Remember this? If A=B and B=C, then A=C
some freak looking at kiddy porn = Some kiddy pornographer making $
Some kiddy pornographer making $ = Some kid being abused
Therefore: some freak looking at kiddy porn = Some kid being abused
Sorry, I smoked my last sig
And people are going to be sent to jail, not because they lied about how much money their company mankes, but because they can't prove that they didn't lie about how much money their company makes.
You show me where that has happened that didn't involve fraud and we'll talk again. In all the corporate fraud cases, there is NO QUESTION they lied about how much money their company had. The only doubt they are trying to raise is personal knowledge of how it got to be that way.
You won't touch my "libertarian ranting" because you know it is true, and there is no arguement you can make.
I know it to be true to you. It is a matter of faith to you and therefore beyond rational argument. Mix in the paranoia angle, and it's foolish to even attempt to discuss....as your expanded rant demonstrates.
+&x
People should NEVER, EVER, EVER, have to prove their innocence! That is not the way laws are supposed to work! Innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be how the law works, even for people who work for comporations!
You must be new to this planet.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
His crimes weren't compared to Bundy's, but rather his demeanor was, in order to point out that demeanor does not imply morality: it is called a reductio ad absurdum. It is not the case that demeanor is essential to terrible crime, and thus those with good demeanor must be terrible criminals, but that demeanor is irrelevant to whether a person is a criminal, and this can be demonstrated by pointing out that some criminals have a good demeanor. You are the one trying to link Lay to Bundy, and trying to attribute this idea to another. You are wrong. Stop it.
What? Me guilty? May I drop dead right here, right now if I'm guilty.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
What is type of Karma would one expect in taking joy at the death of another person? Of doing nothing but adding to the pain of that persons passing?
I agree with you comments and frankly they are among the most reasonable I have seen on this subject. Just wondering why everyone is so happy that this man that killed no one is dead since his death doesn't decrease any of the harm that he has caused?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"still wish people would exercise some personal responsbility"
ken lay did exercise some personal responsibility, namely: I'm responsible for being rich and getting richer...fuck everybody else.
That kind of "personal responsibility"? How about some responsibility to the people that put their entire life savings in your stock? Oh, that was their own fault, right? Perhaps so, but I bet the company was "imploring" them to invest their money back into the stock. And if you bought into that company line, trying to be a "good employee" and all that jazz, you were screwed. You might be able to stand there and say "you should have diversified". But try saying that to someone (not me) who spent like 20-30 years there.
How about the responsibility of knowing WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN YOUR OWN COMPANY?
After all, if he can just claim "Oh, I didn't know", WHAT THE FUCK IS HE BEING PAID FOR?
I know the truth isn't black and white, but this guy was an ASSHOLE.
Unfortunately, he went the easy way.
When I joined my employer in 1997, the 401k plan had a nice paragraph telling you that you shouldn't invest everything into the company stock. That you should diversify.
This is not a new concept, but then again, people still smoke, have unprotected sex, over-eat, believe in lies, etc...
Blar.
and more than likely most of them are products of an age when companies often did care about their employees.
Ummm, what age was that? I don't think such a time ever existed.
- creating a dummy company
- giving Enron money to said dummy company
- taking money back into Enron from said dummy company
- reporting both of the above as revenue
- lather, rinse, repeat to the tune of a few billion.
That doesn't sound like fraud to you? It sure does to me...Can I prove it? Of course not -- but who cares.
Did the Feds prove it? You betcha.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
SOX was a well intended move in the wrong direction. It rewards the guilty. Let me explain. The individual lawyers and accountants as well as the big evil lawyering, accounting and consulting firms profited by finding loopholes in already complicated tax laws. SOX puts a huge burden on businesses to audit their process and paperwork. SOX has brought a tremendous amount of new work to the people who caused the problem in the first place.
The complicated tax laws that regulate business are defective. We need simpler business tax laws that are transparent by design. Simple taxes are simple to audit. The GAAP (generally accepted accouting practice) organizations are a cartel. They preserve complicated accounting schemes to further their self interest.
Nobody knows for sure who killed more than whom, but what we do know without a doubt is that Hitler, the Nazis and the Fascists all shared one common characteristic which was an emphasis on racial superiority justified with a mythical version of European history. Fascism was as much about white pride and racial superiority as Nazism was. Racism is a defining characteristic of both Fascism and Nazism.
Now, Communism, by comparison, has always been explicitly anti-racist and anti-sexist. This was true even under Stalin. That's the key difference between Fasism, Nazism and the crimes of the Soviets. Even if billions had died under Stalin, which obviously wasn't the case, that wouldn't change that fact that the Soviets and Communism was not a racist and sexist ideology.
Unfortunately, I can't say the same thing for conservative Americans.
Savers are losers--it's been proven. You're better off spending all of your money now than saving it and letting the market take it. Or inflation. Or die before you get to enjoy it and then your kids spend it on hookers, blow and ski trips.
I prefer the opposite, a nice heavy load of debt. I may not be ahead of you in $ when I die, but I'll definitely be ahead in living.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
"Most venture investors and entreprenuers feel that Sarbox goes too far. You seem to be speaking strictly from the perspective of a (rather uninformed) public shareholder, and frankly you seem to lack the necessary insight into the costs of Sarbox compliance to form a balanced viewpoint. Increasing penalties for (and actually enforcing) SEC rules would have gone a long way without having to add new requirements."
I'm going to go with "Wrong" on two counts here.
First, so what even if I am an uninformed public shareholder? Does that suddenly mean I really don't need to know, should not be informed of, or have a way to find out the internal workings of how the compnay I own a piece of is operated? Is the company intentionally structured so that only a few insiders with good personal connections can have a clue as to what is going to happen to their investment? Even if I can't tell a balance sheet from a chart of accounts or a budget, the structure and contents of the reports have to be understandable, so the underlying management philosophy can be understandable, so the intent of the managers and Board and prospects for the company can be inferred. We'd all like to think they have one, and hopefully it is in accord with our investemtn goals.
Second, If SEC enforcement had been doing its job, then maybe we wouldn't need more law. OK, maybe true, but clearly it wasn't doing its job so we did need new law and a new approach. It costs nothing to just put it out there and let people see what's up. But that wasn't happening. The backroom wizards found it more convienient to just let slip what was the legally required minimum and hold back stuff "you don't need to know". Ok, thanks for watching out for my interests. But in this case, I as shareholder am supposed to be watching over you. You don't get to decide what is the best way for me to do that. You don't get to play with my money and tell me to shut up and be happy. That is as true for the $100 investor as the $100 million investor. So now the cost of reporting and compliance goes up over what it had been in the past. That is seen as a bad thing, but since the reporting in the past was inadequate under the old regime, I have to wonder if the cost was just artificially low all along.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
John Milton: Eddie Barzoon! Eddie Barzoon! Ha! I nursed him through two divorces, a cocaine rehab, and a pregnant receptionist. God's creature, right? God's special creature? Ha! And I've warned him, Kevin, I've warned him every step of the way. Watching him bounce around like a fucking game, like a wind-up toy! Like 250 pounds of self-serving greed on wheels! The next thousand years is right around the corner, Kevin, and Eddie Barzoon--take a good look. Because he's the poster child for the next millennium! These people, it's no mystery where they come from. You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it could split atoms with its desire, you build egos the size of cathedrals, fiberopticly connect the world to every-eager-impulse, grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green gold-played fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor! Becomes his own God! Where can you go from there? And as for scrambling from one deal to the next, who's got his eye on the planet? As the air thickens, the water sours, even the bees honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity--and it just keeps coming! And it just keeps coming! Faster and faster! There's no chance to think, to prepare, it's `buy futures, sell futures' when there is no future!! We've got a runaway train, boy!! We've got a billion Eddie Barzoons all jogging into the future. Every one of them reading to fist-fuck God's ex-planet, lick their fingers clean as they reach out with their pristine cybernetic keyboards to total up their billable hours!! And then it hits home! It's a little late in the game to buy out now!! Your belly's too full, your dick is sore, your eyes are bloodshot, and you're screaming for someone to help!! But guess what? There's no one there!! You're all alone, Eddie!! [mocking] You're God's special little creature!!
Maybe it's true. Maybe God threw the dice once too often. Maybe He let us all down.
To use your logic, a child who claims sexual abuse and has a man put in jail for 40 years should only get a wagging of a finger for his fib.
It's wrong no matter who lies and for what reason; the millions that Ken and company got for their "stellar stewardship" is reason enough to lie, and keep on lieing.
I certainly agree that people do need to accept their own responiblity for their actions, which appears to be your second point here- so Ken & company should as well.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
So, will Dear Leader El Presidente Bush attend the funeral?
Will Dear Leader El Presidente Bush pardon the fucker post-humously?
Sorta like the movie "Dave" in reverse...
FIXME: Add a sig here
When I read the story, the only thing I could think of is Nelson (from the Simpsons) saying his favorite... "Ha Ha!"
If he was going to fake his death to avoid punnishment, he could have at least come up with a real condition.
Ken Lay memorial urinal has a nice ring to it
Replace the cakes once in awhile, I'm sure it'll go away.
"Lay was found guilty of being in charge of the scheme that had many lose their live-savings" Live-savings, you say? All these years and I haven't been investing in things like plants and slave hands! Thanks Slashdot for making up new words for things that I didn't know I needed to worry about
While I'm as disgusted as anyone by the whole Enron mess, Ken Lay seems to have believed in Enron pretty much right to the end. Sure he sold stock, but only to cover loans he previously received which he used to buy more Enron stock. A recent NYT article points out that his net worth as of the end of 2005 was something like $625,000, so the captain went down with the ship, so to speak. He seems more greedy and incompetent than evil, it seems to me.
Your management team bought houses they couldn't immediately afford (in a small town where the median income is less than $40k!) by borrowing money from the company while operating at a loss and you blame Sarbanes-Oxley for your failure?
But.. but... the Democrats took our jarbs!
Former employees told us constantly throughout the Enron trial that it was a great place to work, and that they felt devoted to him.
I'm sure members of the mafia say the same thing.
The court has determined that this man stole vast sums of money and ruined many lives. The fact that he and his associates did so with a smile and without feeling guilty about it only makes his crimes worse.
By definition, courtesy is a form of insincerity.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me. Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish. These fucking amateurs...
Pity is for the living, the dead deserve a fair assememt of their lives. Key Lay and the rest of his neo-con buddies will rot in hell for their self-serving back room dealings which left millions of families with hardships they wouldn't wish on their own. I pity his widow, children, and grand-children, for the sudden loss of a family member, but not him.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
You show me where that has happened that didn't involve fraud and we'll talk again.
y -news-issue.asp?id=2243s /healy305.htm
SOX is too new for there to be a big long history about it. But let me refer you to a book that will list more examples (all properly researched) than I could ever hope to produce from a quick google search on people convicted on similiar laws.
I am giving you links to reviews of the book from two clearly non-libertarian more scholarly sources, just so you don't complain that is it "Just Libertarian Propoganda". I highly suggest you read the book, even if you disagree with the premise.
http://www.nhbar.org/publications/archives/displa
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/review
I tend to suspect that the oh-so-clever accounting techniques and special purpose entities Andrew Fastow cooked up to keep Enron's debts off their books was far more complicated than Ken could understand. (They're certainly too much for my little brain.) But instead of asking tough questions, Ken just shrugged and signed off on them.
Didn't Lay earn a PhD in Economics from Univeristy of Houston? I'd say he was smart enough to fathom the ins and outs of shady accounting practices and off-the-books recordkeeping.
but it's still their responsibility to invest responsibly so that when disaster does strike, it's not across your entire portfolio.
I love this "blame the victim" attitude.
In fact, this wasn't "disaster striking", as in stock market volatility or other kinds of economic factors, it was fraud. The only people responsible for the losses were at Enron.
Furthermore, the magnitude of the crime remains unchanged whether someone defrauds 100m people for $1 or one person for $100m.
Thats the only way to be sure :)
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
That means he was already charged/convicted and could not cop to a lesser
charge (the plea-bargin tool) in exchange for information regarding anyone.
I think the massive depression and anxiety would be enough of an explanation
without assuming foul play.
Never assume malice to what can be explained by incompetence (or other human weaknesses).
Well said.
clap clap clap
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"You sound like a Republican... can't tell the difference between his head and his ass."
And neither end has a brain. But they say they're Christian, oh yes, and can't understand why Arabs are unhappy to be killed. Shouldn't oil and weapons profits be enough justification?
"No, but people go to jail if they don't comply with SOX. People ARE people."
Yes they are people. People working on a job, in a publicly traded company, with OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY, and they should be able to prove they did it correctly. Legally. Nothing is missing, nothing was fudged or shaded or twsted, turned, swapped or hidden. If those same people want to go home and do those things with their own money in their privately held business, fine. That is between them and their spouses (and the IRS, in a different way). But what they do on the job as a trustee of other people's money should be provably correct and legal.
This isn't a case of "Prove to me you aren't a drug dealer". This is "I gave you $100 and you said you would invest it. Show me the money, account for where it went, or go to jail."
Or to jump on another old trop, faceless corporations do have faces. The people with the no kidding dirty hands. If you hold them accountable, the "faceless corporation" becoems more accountable too. No more diluting the blame into insignificance. You can't hide behind "just following orders".
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
I'd hate for "Kenny-Boy" to get the last laugh on America, you know, by dying early.
I suggest you look up the meaning of "pathetic".
the fucker burns in hell. He deserves it. All those peoples lives he's screwed up for his own gain.
>> "Apparently, his heart simply gave out," said Lay's pastor, Dr. Steve Wende of Houston's First United Methodist Church.
It amazes me that his pastor doesn't excommunicate his ass.
Ted Stevens is from Alaska
Ted Stevens is but a rank amateur compared to Robert Byrd. And of course, unlike Stevens, Byrd has such a colorful background, being unanimously elected as the "Exalted Cyclops" of his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, you can't beat stuff like that.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Minister: "He was a loner and a quiet young man. He attended church and Sunday school. I remember he was always very polite."
Koppel: "Do you believe he killed Buckwheat?"
Minister: "Oh, yes. Definitely. That's all he ever talked about."
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
Now I don't know enough about Ken Lay to proclaim whether he was a psychopath or not, but it sorta makes me wonder. I mean we already know that he had no remorse in shafting the investors, the employees and everyone, but the GP's moving testimony just makes some more pieces fall into place.
Here are some relevant paragraphs:
Does it sound yet like Ken Lay telling employees a rags-to-riches story about creating the company from nothing?
Also worth remembering:
So in a way I'm not surprised that someone would be manipulated to the point of respecting the guy who shafted him. Psychopaths are _good_ at that kind of thing. Damn good. _Incredibly_ good. Unless you happen to be the direct target of their mind games or power games or intimidation games (they do all that a lot), you could live next to one for a decade and respect the heck out of him.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"natural" death is when you don't pop your pills when your heart is in that kind of shape.
Its hard to prove he didn't take his medications. Its hard to disclose his medical records or even access them. I doubt we will hear any real proof either way.
Now, if we find out there were more than legal benefits to his death, then that should be enough for most of us...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Then why the hell would they work for a company that seemed to be doing well, that had matching stock options and paid a decent raise? Why didn't they each hire accountants and detectives to verify what the SEC required accountants were saying regarding the state of the company. Hell, why didn't they whip out their telepathy helmets and read the board's brains and see what was going on? 'Course, they coulda' watched their futur-vision screens and know ahead of time that the company was going under. Meh. Fucking losers!
I drank what? -- Socrates
...because to have a coronary, I thought you had to have a heart.
Oh my god, i found a penny
He is chilling on the beach sipping on a margarita enjoying his new identity given to him by the elite who he helped make richer by robbing thousands of people of everything they had.
you might be surprised.
I'd vote for him... As would nearly all of my friends.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
> died of a massive coronary before he could receive his sentence
Sounds like he got his sentence afterall. And swifter than the court system could mete a slap on the wrist out.
I bet that someone as rich as him (you can bet he squirrelled away lots of cash in numbered offshore bank accounts) can easily fake his own death.
A compulsive liar - with utter contempt for the law and democratic norms of 'justice' - faced with the prospect of spending so much time in jail - with lots of friends in high places (he was the #1 contributor to G. W. Bush's campaign in 2000 - he lent GWB his own private jet for campaigning)
People like that NEVER do time in jail.. Lets not let him get away with it....
The CIA's favourite techniques are:
1) Plane/car crashes.
2) Heart attacks.
They didnt want him talking. They were probably stringing him along the entire way saying things like, "its ok lay my boy, well get you out of this mess!"... "Why dont you take a nice vacation to colorado and well arange everything!"
The first thing i thought when i saw this this morning was CIA. Its wayyy too convienient. Kinda funny it made slashdot though, wasnt expecting that.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
While there is nothing wrong with creating laws to punish people guilty of theft and fraud, there are big problems with creating a system where everyone must prove their innocence on a regular basis or be considered guilty. Especially, like in the Sarbanes-Oxley, it is a series of vauge rules that are very difficult to comply with and can be arbitrarily enforced. This is more fodder for the government to go after it's critics, or to demand political donations as protection money for non-enforcement, or to help a company with political connections by going after it's competitor, and the fixed costs of compliance help keep smaller buisnesses with competing with large corporations. It is not going to stop this kind of corporate crime, it is just another tool for the government to aid certain corporate criminals, and harrass other people they don't like.
At best this sort of thing just takes away resorces which could otherwise be usefully used to identify criminals. At worst it actually gives criminals a way to hide what they are up to.
FYI - nobody cares. Thanks for playing.
Too bad for your BDS-driven fantasies, but Enron's accounting fraud happened in the 1990s - when Bill Clinton was President.
What's the color of the sky on the planet you're on?
with the help of the administration staff....
with a new passport ID, and his level of connection...
my rat brain sez, heart attack at age 64, with full staff attending him daily... this is fishy.
First, so what even if I am an uninformed public shareholder? Does that suddenly mean I really don't need to know, should not be informed of, or have a way to find out the internal workings of how the compnay I own a piece of is operated?
Dude--it's not like you couldn't do that BEFORE S.Ox came into being. In order to be a publically traded company the SEC still had a fairly long list of reporting requirements and accounting practices. Yes, there were too many places where you could still cook the books and fabricate public earnings statements but this Sarbanes Oxley business is sometimes akin to using 100 tonnes of concrete to plug a thumb-sized leak in the dam.
Even if I can't tell a balance sheet from a chart of accounts or a budget, the structure and contents of the reports have to be understandable, so the underlying management philosophy can be understandable, so the intent of the managers and Board and prospects for the company can be inferred.
If you cannot tell the difference between basic financial documents then you shouldn't be investing. Period. I mean it--don't even get into mutual funds if you can't tell the difference between its prospectus and a bus schedule and don't trust your broker. That is the case even with S.Ox now in place. Learn the basics of finance and do your reearch before putting money you count on into such investments. If your broker will not give you inofrmation you ask for then fire his arse. *INFORMED* investors lost minimal amounts in the Enron crash becasue the corporate fundamentals were sideways and heading south. People who lost money were those who depended on and trusted not only the word of morally bankrupt executives, but that of fund managers/brokers/"experts" who said "trust me--this is a cyclical thing and it'll turn around so you should stay in for the long haul to recover your losses". Easy enough for them to say--it is not their own money they're playing with.
BTW there ARE initiatives that are/were being considered outside S.Ox that would be much less onerous for corporate accountants. Firstly, there are standard reporting formats that are being more aggressively implemented. In Canada businesses have things like the General Index of Financial Information, which defines a set of standard accounts/codes that corporations must adhere to when filing taxes. In the US, public companies must have insider trading information available online. All over the world, they are looking at mandating things like financial statements being available online, on-demand in XBRL format. This way every corporation has information structured in the same way, whenever you want it, in the same way we can with RSS feeds from our favourite blogs.
Second, If SEC enforcement had been doing its job, then maybe we wouldn't need more law.
IF the SEC was not enforcing existing rules well enough, how could you expect them to adequately enfore even MORE rules?
It costs nothing to just put it out there and let people see what's up. But that wasn't happening.
Holy CRAP is that a ridiculous statement. It costs a LOT to "just put it out there". I work in the industrial automation field and *I've* had requests to modify/upgrade plant-floor systems because they do not meet the demands of Sarbanes Oxley. Operators and maintenance people have to be given logins. Companies have to know details down to the stupidest level sometimes--stuff that wouldn't be remotely important to investors. Yes, there is definitely a use for some of the data but what does Joe Schmoe Investor care about how many hours Employee 3422 spent reprogramming a controller so every tenth of a cent of operations & maintenance expenses can be backed by detailed records? Yes, you need to know the 5000-foot-picture as an investor, but you don't need to see each blade of grass on the ground below.
You don't get to decide what is the best way for me to do that. You don't get to play with my money and tell me to shut up and be happy
died today. -- Queen
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
How about: "Errrk! :thump:"?
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
Good.
Don't worry. There are bands of attorneys already converging on civil court to suck down all that wealth. He doesn't need to be alive for his estate to be contested in civil court.
His family won't starve. They probably won't get the whole wad of loot, either.
Skilling! We have your number buddy. Grim Reaper is coming for you next pal!
Does anyone else get the feeling that this was really suicide. Reason #1: He was to scare to go to prison. Reason #2: He wanted to leave something to his family, because everything was going to be lost in civil suits.
First, so what even if I am an uninformed public shareholder? Does that suddenly mean I really don't need to know, should not be informed of, or have a way to find out the internal workings of how the compnay I own a piece of is operated?
I didn't mean uninformed with respect to the specific workings of a given company. I meant uninformed on what Sarbox is and what it costs to implement.
The reality is that your interests as a shareholder are almost certainly _undermined_ by sarbox because businesses have to pay more to implement and maintain the procedures, which costs you as a shareholder not just directly on today's bottom line, but also in distracting the business from it's core competency. Sarbox compliance isn't just hiring a couple more lawyers and bean counters - there are procedural requirements that ripple down through every level of the organization in order to produce the additional reporting.
(I believe there's a documentary movie based on the book as well...)
There is, I rented it from NetFlix, and it was very disappointing. Nearly all of the information in the movie should be common knowledge to someone who reads a newspaper or reads CNN.com on a semi-regular basis. The only interesting aspect was the biographies of Skilling, Lay, and Fastow, which allowed me to understand the personalities of the people involved instead of just the facts that come out of the news.
my blog
PUBLIC CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE!!!!11!!!!
Right, but Soylent Green is.
...wait.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
The thing with Ken Lay was, as oppossed to most wealthy people in Texas, is he appered to have no morals or humility.
You clearly don't know any wealthy Texans.
Why is Kenneth Lay's death marked suicide when he died of natural causes?
It is the owner that crashes the system. If you are enough of an idiot to put 50 background processes in Windows you sho
Talk about getting off..
Oh well his justice wasnt on earth so now he gets the ultimate judgement!
Feel sorry for all the people who lost their life savings to the collective of corporate crooks.
Karma, the real kind as discussed in eastern philosophy is based on a person's ACTIONS. Not emotions. Feeling an emotion is not an act of karma. Besides
>adding to the pain of that persons passing
how does feeling happy that this scumbag died cause pain to anyone else? Crowing about it in the face of his relatives might be bad karma, but considering they were the chief secondary beneficiaries of his rapacious greed, the chances of his relatives being surprised about this reaction would be extremely low. And if they had a lot of feelings to get hurt, maybe they'd feel compassion for the victims of Lay's evil, and feel relief that some people would feel a bit of vindication at his death. Personally, I think him dying now is getting off easy. Piece of shit.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
I'm not an apoligist stooge for anyone, at best he should have known what his staff was doing when he was CEO-that alone is enough to make him partially culpable. However, prior to the bankruptcy of Enron, the retirement plans were unfrozen and employees were net purchasors of Enron stock not sellers. This is after Skilling became CEO, called an analyst and asshole on a teleconference call, and quit. After the company had announced some very poor accounting results, and after the stock price had begun a severe downturn and lenders and trading partners were beginning to have major concerns about the company's creditworthiness.
Stupidity generally begats its own reward, but nearly every financial document published in the last 30 years has had the same bit of advice don't ever own all of your assets in your employer's stock! If things get bad you are likely to loose both your retirment money and your job! If they couldn't even be bothered to follow the number one rule of investing then I don't feel much pity for them. Neither would I feel a whole lot of pity for someone who parks their convertible Rolls in Compton with the top down while going to the cash machine to grab $10,000 and counts it out loud on the way back to the car!
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
"And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead"
Be heard || Be herd
Not if you mean to show respect and consideration, you puerile malcontent.
The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'
anyone feel like modding this person? Anyway, yea a jail sentence is way tougher than the death sentence; I screamed 'WELL ROT THEN at the TV when I heard Lay got off so easily. Then it came to my attention that he died in Aspen. What? He wasn't in Jail? Why the fuck not?
Lots of people think that Sadaam Hussein & Osama Bin Laden and anyone who stands accused of similar atrocities should face the death sentence, but being incarcerated in some shithole jail for 20 years (with intermittent acts of buggery by suitably hairy gay inmates) I think might hurt them more than Martyrdom. The same goes for the Bali bomber; I can't imagine that indonesian jails are fun for anyone.
In a twist, however, I think that a more suitable 'punishment', if you'd like to call it that for Mr Bin Laden would to be in some contrived way forced to live like an ordainary citizen of one of the countries he supposedly wages holy war against. I doubt if it'd change his view of the world (though you can only live in hope that this type of person's views are changeable) but I think it might force humility on a self-proclaimed warrior.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Well, I gues that makes you a republican then. ;)
~X~
~X~
Ken Lay's death prompts confusion on Wikipedia
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
The ones who survive also have to pay for their mistakes...
Luckly Ol' Kenny Boy all of the sudden, very unexpected like had a heart attack right before he was going to be sentenced.
If you must!
Now, for $199.95, you too can own the new Kenneth Lay Toilet! Commisioned by the ARBKL (Ass-Raped By Ken Lay) group, this remarkable likeness of the recently deceased greedy bastard allows you to urinate, vomit, or defecate straight down his throat any time day or night!
As a free bonus, a unique surround sound system plays choice quotes when you flush! Memorable lines such as "We're doing great!" and "Well turn this around!" play in such high quality that you may have trouble controlling your bowels. This model also includes the new sound of someone dying from a massive heart attack when the toilet clogs!
It comes with a lifetime guarantee too! Just call 1-877-xxx-xxx. These are going fast so hurry and order yours today!
~X~
~X~
He paid a physician to "spare his family further grief" by filing the cause of death as a "massive coronary", when, in fact, he committed suicide by overdose.
Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid.
Even though I know you are kidding, I still have to fight my fist of death not to kick your ass for even mentioning trickle-down-economics ;)
He was a bastard!
Exactly. What kind of fool puts all their savings in any one stock? Only those that want to get rich quick.
Ken Lay was guilty of incompetence -- hardly worthy of a life sentence. Witch hunt.
Nah, that's too much of a conspiracy theory.
Suprisingly, according to Texas Law since Ken Lay never made it to his sentencing, he died an innocent men. Well I guess it is not a human judge that he needs to worry about facing now.
Damn. What the hell have I been thinking.
damn him and his ancestors
To me, the shocking thing about all these hateful posts is that this guy wasn't a serial killer or a rapist; he committed white collar crimes. Securities fraud. Wire fraud. Making false statements to banks.
..and giving you the right to do whatever you want to his dead corpse, or literally "piss" all over his family? Seriously, have you people gone completely fucking mad?
.. just trying to provoke a reaction. Please --- don't reply. Just stop and think about what you're saying. Think about the bad things you've done in life, and how someone who might not know the full story could perceive those things as being much worse than they actually were. I wonder how many people in this thread have a school-zone speeding ticket or a DUI. Are you evil?
You can dance around and tell me that his actions resulted in thousands of millions of deaths or whatever else, but he wasn't charged or convicted for any of those things. Let's see - he ended up with about ten convictions, resulting in possibly up to 30 years in jail (had he made it to sentencing).. and he was evil?
I think you folks need to take a step back and look at what you're saying. Even if he personally stole thousands of dollars from you, does that really equate to being "evil"?
This guy broke modern-day accounting laws. Yes, some people lost lots of money. Welcome to the wonderful world of "investing" - that's why you get interest on the money, because there are no risk-free investments, period.
I'm not an especially spiritual individual, but I sure do pray that this "mob" attitude doesn't represent the majority. Oh, and you can write off what I say as "Troll" or "Flamebait"
'Meaning' to show respect and consideration is insincere.
Having respect and consideration isn't, but if you have it, you don't need to 'mean' to show it. You just do.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
for maintenance just when his brain was at peak demand for oxygen. So he suffered a rolling blackout.
This guy have SO much venom hurled against him in houston I won't be surpised to find his body dug up one day and horrible, wonderfully horrible things done to it.
I will be also be fun to watch the tasteless slurs hurled at the the grieving family. If I could get a ticket I would be right down there, laughing at thier tears, mocking the kids and grand kids, making sure that everyone of them understands that the world is a better, happier, less evil place now that the man they cared about is dead...
Basically, it's a GOOD thing to make sure that everyone else thinking of destroying SO many lives understands that even when dead you will the torture will not end, and that it will be passed on as long as people still remember.
Three words for these fuckers: Financial Death Penalty.
Take every single goddamn dime away from them. Everything they own, period. Including assets in other countries, jail them until they turn them over. Everything single thing they own, everything their spouse owns, everything their minor kids own. (We, however, will give the kid's stuff back when they hit 18.)
And just like a divorce, if it looks like did something to try to keep something afterwards, like selling your car for 'one dollar and other considerations' to a friend or putting the deed to your house in the name of your 16 year-old son...no. We grab that too.
We'll let them stick, say, a thousand dollars worth of family heirlooms and photo albums and paintings their kids did in storage and they can buy them back if they ever get enough money, and the rest goes to auction. (Most of the actual personal stuff like photographs is technically valueless, so they should be able to buy all their memories back for 20 bucks or so, before anyone whines about that.)
And then, of course, we aren't completely heartless. We'll give them one of those 'out of prison' outfits and fifty bucks, just like anyone walking out prison gets.
And before anyone says 'What about the children?', there are plenty of poor children in this country. They can always apply for food stamps. Any proposed consideration shown to those kids better apply to kids born to families with almost nothing, or you subconsciously think rich kids 'deserve' more.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Or who were forbidden from diversifying, in that they were banned from selling while it was good.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Oh, and before anyone says 'But that's much harsher than the crime!'...um, duh. You kidnap someone for two days, you don't get two days in jail. You steal 17 dollars in mugging, you don't get a 17 dollar fine. In both those cases, you'll be 'paying' more than ten times your crime, and maybe even a hundred or a thousand times your crime. Just having to pay back what you took, or close to it, would just mean you're back when you started and there's no incentive not to do it.
You steal, say, more than twenty million dollars...well....we take it all.
And, in actual fact, I suspect such people wouldn't spend a single day on the street. Rich people have rich friends who will be able to spare a house or two for the criminal to live in while trying to get him some new cushy CEO position. It's more the principle of the thing.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
On recommendations from his new head financial advisor, Satan has announced that company 401k matching will henceforth only be honored on purchases of company stock.
Just wondering, of all the guys, his testimony against him from people who cut deals for less time. And he did in the past urge for strong accounting practices. As for loans, everyone took loans out, was a common practice. In the end they got him for 6 counts? Far less than everyone else.
Seems the government wanted him no matter what. Didnt he actually loose almost 90% of his money because he kept enron stock?
Dont know, but He seems like an escape goat to me. Worked his way up, had his PHD, and did alot for the community.
I dont like when the government offers deals, most people will lie to get a sentence reduced to 5 years.
Laws are only as good as the people who enforce them.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
1. Arousing or capable of arousing sympathetic sadness and compassion: "The old, rather shabby room struck her as extraordinarily pathetic" (John Galsworthy).
2. Arousing or capable of arousing scornful pity.
What most defenders of ken lay do is say "he grew up so poor, and did so much, so even though he has done bad, he did it becuase he knew no better". In other words, they are asking us to forgive his trangresses because of his past, in yet other words,they are creating a pathetic story so we pity him.
This is no different from the stories that justify illegal border crossing, and though most of those do nothing else that is illegal, some do and then create pitiful stories to justify the actions. Believe me I here all these sad stories all the time, and know such stories normally come from people who are too weak to take responsibility for thier own actions.
How can you be forbidden to diversify?
Step 1: don't buy security X.
Step 2: buy security Y.
Don't say the 401(k) limited them -- just invest elsewhere. If you are sitting on a 401(k) with 90%+ Enron stock and that's your only retirement savings, you're an idiot.
Companies are already spending money on internal reporting. Or at least they should be. Sarbanes imposes greater requirements on what must be collected and reported. So the cost isn't in collection, unless we're talking about companies that are serious cowboys and flouting both old AND new law.
The additional cost will be in the new reporting in new ways. Is it more? Yes. But again, was the previous system adequate? If it wasn't, and that seems to be the evidence, then reporting costs would, and properly should, go up You were already spending money on a system that wasn't working, so now you'll be spending somewhat more on a system that will. It just becomes a question of how much more, and are we (the compnay and investors) getting good value from the information reporting systems we create. That is exactly the same problem every MIS in every enterprise anywhere has. Completely independent of Sarbanes-Oxley, the management should have a feel for where the money and effort come from and go to.
If Sarbanes-Oxley is forcing the collection and reporting of useless information, that is a flaw. But just saying that if costs go up it must be bad is seriously shortsighted analysis. Especially considering the opacity investors were facing. And if Lay was to be believed, he wasn't being served by his internal information systems either.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Most people here are eager to 'piss on Lay's grave', but I never see people pointing fingers at the tech industry. When Enron tanked, it wiped out about $66 billion worth of market cap. Tech stocks like Lucent, Cisco, JDSU, and others had far bigger losses. Lucent took out about $1/4 trillion worth of market cap. Are the heads of Lucent 4 times 'guiltier' than the Enron executives?
What about all the people who worked at dot coms? They pulled in big salaries, blew money on upscale offices and Herman Miller Aeron chairs for everyone, all the time knowing that the businesses had no commercial value. Some people couldn't even describe what their dotcoms actually did. After the VC money was spent, and the stocks tanked, all those people scattered to the wind. I suspect that more than a few people reading slashdot lived the good life on some poor old widow's mutual fund money in the heyday of dotcom boom. I'll wait to see if anyone turns up to piss on their graves.
But an attitude of caveat emptor and a basic understanding of capital markets sure would have helped.
THOSE BASTA... actually, Thanks! Score one for California
Yes, because we ALL know that Wikipedia is the most accurate, honest, unbiased, and trustworthy source to cite, especially in regard to emotionally charged current events?
*rolling eyes*
Libertas in infinitum
Yes, because we ALL know that Wikipedia is the most accurate, unbiased, and trustworthy source to cite, especially in regard to emotionally charged current events?
*rolling eyes*
Libertas in infinitum
...do indeed have a party. In fact there are two of them; the Libertarian Party, and the Constitution Party.
n ited_States)U nited_States)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Party_(U
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_Party_(
I tend to align with both, but moreso with the Libertarian Party than the CP.
Libertas in infinitum
Ding dong the bitch is dead
Which bitch?
The thieving bitch
Ding dong the thieving bitch is dead
Oh? Well whether wikipedia says it or not, the FUCKING FACTS are that Enron was not "created by Lay from nothing" as the parent article said. Check his own fucking autobiography, ask his friends, the facts are there! (I only cited wikipedia because it's bookmarked on my browser). Lay was not a magical happy man who pissed mountain dew and shat cotton candy -- he was a businessman who managed to make some good deals and merged two powerful companies into a superpowerful company and then fucked thousands or loyal employees over so he could make a quick buck. Good riddance, the world has enough assholes as it is.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
...a scheme of complex offshore holdings...
In other words, money laundering.
Does the Enron case prove that the social security model of Europe is better? as a European, I have a hard time accepting that I should trust my life with the corporation I work with, especially after seeing how all of them (and not just my boss) are doing business. The Enron case confirms my distrust on corporations and my preference to social security models supported by the state/government. I certainly wouldn't like to have no security/health insurance/pention when I grow old.
Of course there are other options in USA, aren't they? but how easy are those options to follow?
I'm not going to justify your ignorant rantings with a response other than to say that you are an idiot.
Libertas in infinitum
Take every single goddamn dime away from them. Everything they own, period. Including assets in other countries, jail them until they turn them over.
You'd have to include trusts for which they are the primary beneficiary as well. People expecting to go down would have a lot of money to spend finding ways to secure their money.
I want to be sure. I want to stick a knife in his lifeless corpse just for sure.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
A Corporation is like a psycopath or child, in that it does not have a conscience or any real internal self-policing mechanism. So it is entirely reasonable to treat Corporations as potentially "guilty" (of acting selfishly and purely in the pursuit of profit) and this requires some form of external monitoring/punishment.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Why do all these free market evangelists think that running your own business is the pinnacle of human achievement, and that to do anything else (like being a mere employee) is somehow immoral?
I, for one, do not want to spend eighteen hours a day for ten+ years building up my own company.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So you still don't accept the facts that Ken Lay did not "build Enron from nothing"? Well I guess your ignorance wins. We should inform everyone else how wrong they are.
a tion
e r/enron_time.html
n ron-chronology.htm
Oh look, reference.com thinks Northern Natural Gas, one of the two companies that merged to form Enron, was formed in the 1930's... well, maybe Ken Lay had that "time travel" thing down http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Enron_Corpor
They think he became CEO the year after Enron was formed http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/infrastructure/pow
Man, maybe I would expect it from some "reference.com" place and from the hippie PBS, but not from you USA Today... you've changed http://www.usatoday.com/money/energy/2001-11-28-e
Answers.com has always been b.s. so it's no wonder they're in on the lies too http://www.answers.com/topic/kenneth-lay
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Just remember, if Vince Foster had only had a gun with him he'd be alive today.
The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.
Ha Ha !
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
I see far too many comments considering that homosexual rape is a fit punishment for somebody.
You guys are barbaric, you presume to be civilized but in many ocassions you show ideas no better than the ones spoused by a Hutu or Serbian war criminal.
It speaks volumes about US society that many consider normal a situation in which inmates in jail can be abused, tortured or raped.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Basically, Fastow's partnerships were initially based on some rules that were very lenient (if you had a small outside ownership investment) you could put a business in there and it wouldn't be an Enron investment. Imagine this, a company has been buying stock and some of the shares bought in 1999 (say 100,000 worth of them) have gone down a lot. The rules as they were then would let you create a company with a $9,700 investment, get an outside party to contribute $300, and the new company would borrow another $90,000 from a bank (under a loan guarantee from you). This new company could buy your stock from you at the price you paid for it and then eat the losses. It's debt wouldn't show up on your balance sheet (although you would be paying for it). At that time guarantees didn't have to be booked on the balance sheet.
Fastow then used these structures to enrich himself, via the non independant ownership stakes. He would pay himself and cronys huge management fees for running the companies and similar things.
Lay's biggest flaw was that he was a pushover and either didn't understand or didn't pay enough attention to what the CEO was doing (not that those were the only things) the international businesses made a string of terrible investments as they were compensated for closing a deal (based on the deal size rather than it's return).
In that sense, Lay (and perhaps Skilling) were very responsible for creating (and "nurturing" an environment where that could occur, but was unlikely to have directly participated in fraudulent activities.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
It is quite possible to hold deep respect for someone but fail to display it adequately. I know because I've made that mistake before. This is the reason for things like dress codes at work and salutes in the military, because miscommunication can happen even with nonverbal signals.
The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'
Oh my God, you've killed Kenneth...
You, uh, well, non-bastards?!
"shafting... the employees..."
Now, as an aside, how exactly did he shaft the employees? His crime was concealing the fact that the company was tanking, thus screwing (some) investors. The company would have tanked even faster if not for the criminality of Lay - hence, the net effect on the employees was that they recieved wages for a longer period of time than had been the case if Lay & co had stayed within the law.
Of course, lots of employees had their careers screwed over and their stock options and stock made worthless by the bankruptcy, but that would have come to pass even faster if not for the fraud. (This was not a case of Lay stealing company cash and spending it on booze and hookers, after all.)
I'm not from Cali or a third-world country so I'm not exactly familiar with rolling blackouts; but man, I wish we could bring back the 2003 East-Coast blackout.
......oh, yeah, and remember: turn down your air-conditioning if you don't want it to repeat itself.
Benefits:
- being able to see all the stars (including Mars, which was dangerously 'close' to the Moon that night) from the downtown of one of the larger Canadian cities.
- neighbourhoods brought together by shared adversity/boredom: everyone was outside drinking the beer before it got warm in the fridge
- free gelato from gelato place for those who wanted to wait in lines that stretched up and down the block
- dining by forced candlelight in what few restaurants were still open by virtue of operating solely on gas
- the bizarre sight of people in Quebec still having power right across the river (I guess I just revealed what city it was to anyone with a decent sense of Canadian geography...)
- watching the power come back grid by grid by grid
- day off for most workers starting at 4:00 pm or so.
Disadvantages:
- my grandmother needed surgery that day - cardiac issues; the hospital, being on emergency back up power, didn't want to chance it. She had to wait until the grid came back up. (She's still alive and kicking though, nearing 90. I imagine many were not so lucky.)
- lost revenue for said gelato place. (Although the free samples probably brought in many new customers.)
- mass chaos on roads, as 6-lane intersections become fourway stops.
- no water, unless it comes from the store, for those of us who had wells (yeah, it's weird. There's an underground lake in my city and my family never switched onto the city water. No fluoride for us!)
- drunken pretentious highschool kids wandering down the street singing "Jerusalem" and reciting the first act of "The Importance of Being Earnest"
I know. The lack of power is a serious problem for our western societies. And what Enron did, if indeed, as you say, they were directly responsible for the rolling blackouts in California, is deplorable. But as an able-bodied youngster in a high population-density area, this long-ish blackout was immensely entertaining; far from making us thankful that we did, indeed have power once we got it back --at my house, that was 3 days later, mmm mmm, no shower-- it made us sad that our electronic society has cut people off from their fellow man. Everybody seemed so much friendlier and happier without power. We all wanted it to be a yearly occurrence.
Inheritance gets whatever he had left + life insurance benefits (which I bet is a pretty good chunk of any state budget)
IANAL, either; however, I believe a finding of "guilty" by a jury in criminal court may be admissible in civil court. (A plea of guilty would be as well; I understand this is the main distinction between that and a plea of "nolo contendere" — a NC plea is inadmissable in other proceedings.) The class-action vultures will probably be targeting his estate on behalf of Enron shareholders and pensioners soon enough. The heirs in his will shouldn't plan to spend their new inheritance any time soon.
As an Atheist, I get no satisfaction from him keeling over.
Yeah; believers at least have the hope that he might be facing a more lasting sentence from a Higher Court; I doubt his heart would be lighter than a Shu feather.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The down-side to Sarbox is that it massively increases accouting burden and raises the bar in terms of funds and overhead required for any small company to go public. Most venture investors and entreprenuers feel that Sarbox goes too far.
Of course they do, anything that scruntinizes them and costs them money they feel goes to far. EPA regulations, pesky child labor laws, OSHA mine safety, minmum wage, this list goes on and on. Damn waht happened to the 1800s and the Robber Barons?
The fact is, if human being weren't so greedy, selfish, and easily corrupted by wealth and power, the cost could be saved. Unfortunately, we need to be shown time and again, they indeed are. Sarbox is the price we have to pay to rein in evil people like Ken Lay.
We are accepting donations now.
It is quite possible to hold deep respect for someone but fail to display it adequately
No, it's possible for you to hold someone in respect but for them not to notice it, because society has conditioned them to look for the appearance of respect instead of actual respect.
As for military salutes, those don't have anything to do with respect for the people being saluted. They are to remind everyone of the chain of command and keep up disipline, both of which the military relies on. While I think most 'artifical' indications of respect are stupid, the military has specific different needs, and the whole thing there is a continual reaffirmment of following orders and regulations.
And nothing that's manditory can ever be an indication of respect, period, except maybe doing it can be an indication of at least some respect for the rules. It can't be an indication of respect of any specific person, that concept doesn't even make any sense.
As for the business world, who respects their boss more: Someone who wears exactly the right clothes, following both the formal and informal dress code, who says 'yes sir' to everything, and then goes and does whatever they want or at least as far as they can twist their instructions to cover, or someone who grudingly wears a suit that mostly fits within the dress code, doesn't say 'sir', but actually does whatever their boss suggests and what they think their boss would want when they don't have specific instructions?
And who has more respect: Someone who hand-writes thank you cards for Christmas cards, or someone who, if you were to show up at their house bleeding from a gunshot at four in the morning and ask to borrow their car, two changes of clothes, their credit card, their cell phone, and their handgun for three days for a reason you can't explain, and not to tell anyone, would let you?
The first person shows respect in their trivial actions, but don't actually have any respect. The latter shows respect by their important actions, because they respect the person and the decisions they make, and make the assumption there is a good reason behind them.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Is that you, R. Kelly?
Obviously some annoying conspiracies have caused you to close your mind to distinct possibilities. Go revisit the 911 situation again. Do the research yorurself. See what's out there. It has way more validity than holocaust denial. Way more.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
That puppy I kicked? Probably would've bitten a small child someday.
I didn't say I was accepting or rejecting anything about Ken Lay. My point is that for anything other than cocktail discussion, Wikipedia is not the most reliable source, ESPECIALLY in regards to issues in which there are very high emotional opposing opinions.
In your most recent posting you link to sources other than Wikipedia. Whether you agree with them or not, this tends to lend more support to your argument (whatever it may be) in a more credible way than simply posting a link to Wiki.
Libertas in infinitum
That must have gone *whoosh* over the mods' heads, cuz that's funny :)
I had heard that sociopathy is rampant amongst politicians as well as criminials
There they are a conga line of suck holes. On the conservative side of Australian politics. - Mark Latham
I no longer consider 64 to be that old, given both the progress of modern medicine and the fact that I'm now 50 (:-), but it's old enough that when you've spent a few years riding a high-risk company down the tubes and another few years of trials, been convicted, and you're about to be given a sentence of "Die in Jail, Loser", it's gotta be pretty stressful, and a heart attack is no surprise. Autopsy may tell us whether it was that or suicide, but either way the guy died from stress and fear, and that's a sad thing - even if he did deserve to die in jail from old age.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In the end Ken Lay was nothing special except for his cluelessness and lack of humility.
Hmmm... where do I sign up for a job as a CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation? Apparently, I do not even need a clue to run one. I guess you just gotta be in the right place at the right time. Right?
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
As our president and his father know, one can always hire people to do one's thinking, but to survive those hired hands must be of quality. As has been reported, most recently in the Times a couple days ago, Ken Lay repeatedly hired dishonest people, and repeatedly allowed unethical activity to go on in the hopes of profit. This is the mark of a man without a clue, and the proof is that he was not able keep Enron alive in the bad times, and the stress of his actions killed him before he could stand in a court and recieve the consequences.
As was mentioned, in Texas the rich come and go. The trick is to have enough integrity and intellegence not to get greedy and lose everything in a firey mess.
Hey he did more living in his 60 years than most people do in their lives. And while he died with money and probably with a roof over his head, many of the people he screwed over at enron have no pensions and won't have such comforts when their time comes.
Screw Ken Lay. I hope the worms don't gag.
So the people of California, and the businesses existing there, should have made the educated decision not to put all their eggs in one basket when the power went out?
This isn't even an analogy, this is something that Mr. Lay was responsible for!
Jeremy
As I said before, I'm not trying to forward that Ken Lay is a good person, or that he wasn't responsible for the things he was responsible for. I am saying that not ALL the blame falls on him for the people who lost EVERYTHING. The people who lost their entire retirement/investment savings/whatever really don't have anyone but themselves to blame for that. Regardless of Enron's practices regarding their restrictive 401(k) plans, the employees working there had every oportunity to independantly diversify, and they did not. That is not Ken Lay's fault.
Yes, let me say this again, for everyone with a thick skull: Ken Lay is a bad person. He deserved whatever jail time he [probably] would [not] have gotten, and whatever other penalty besides. This is not the issue I am trying to argue. I am trying to say that (as the parent of this thread put forward) comparing Ken Lay to a serial killer is an overexaggeration, and is implying that the employees of Enron had no blame whatsoever for their eventual financial downfall.