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."
Either scenario seems equally likely, and much more likely than 'Ken keeled over because he couldn't keep his LDLs in check'.
It's only 'much more likely' if you're a paranoia spewing Slashdot fool.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Dear God, for the sake of humanity, please take the rest of those corrupt Republican potato chips!
-Don
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Hey Karl Rove, thanks for the heart warming bio of the greedbag that was Kenneth Lay.
"But this one goes to 11!"
"Care to tell us all exactly what he did to deserve punishment?"
What f*cking planet are you from exactly?? If you don't know what was wrong with Mr. Lay's actions, I suggest you never venture into any field involving "business ethics"...
"But this one goes to 11!"
Funny that you begin your comment about how you personally benefited from the blackouts, making your judgment about Ken Lay seem a bit disingenuous.
Anyway, the main reason for those California blackouts was poor public policy: Holding residential rates constant while forcing companies to buy power on the spot market, often selling power at a loss. Meanwhile prohibiting building new power plants to satisfy the environmental lobby. I'm not quite sure where Enron fits in there but certainly they were not the only companies messing with the market, and in the end it was the regulators' fault for allowing the market to be messed with in the first place.
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.
It's now occupied by Kenneth Lay.
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
At least! We are finaly seeing some progress on the war of terrorism.
In any case, though, Enron was an obvious fraud to many people. I've always been suspicious of any group that makes the type of claims they did. "Snake oil salesman" comes to mind. Guess I'm too suspicious to listen favourably on 99% of what any corporations trading on stock exchanges have to say...
You sound pretty ignorant. You sound like a "progressive", too. But I repeat myself.
The reality is California handed out-of-state power companies the keys to our pocketbooks (I am a resident of the Peoples Republic of Califonia). Power "deregulation" was in no way, shape, or form actual deregulation. It was a scheme where regulations that had been working were replaced by a new set of regulations guarenteed to be a train wreck in a few years.
The stupidity of the scheme was two-fold. On the one hand, we've got the toughest environmental regulations on the planet. It takes more than a decade to site a power plant, even a relatively clean natural gas plant. The law is written such that anybody in the general area can tie you up in court until the project has no hope of ever making money. But we still need power, so the upshot was a dependence on power companies in other states to actually supply the power.
The dumbest thing they did was forbid power retailers from buying anything on a long-term contract. That means any interruption in the supply - a war in the gulf, a refinery fire, power plant maintennence, anything - gets bourne by the end-user. The spot market has always been volatile, and people who understand how these things work knew this would be a problem.
And yes, the power producers took advantage of the situation. But it wasn't just Enron. One of the biggest gougers was the fucking City of fucking Los Angeles, which sold its excess municipal power to the rest of us at a huge premium. But I don't really blame them, because the state did the equivalent of park a brand new Mercedes in a bad neighborhood with the keys in the ignition.
You really would have to be a Democrat to come up with California's phoney "deregulation" scam, and they were. I sometimes wonder if it was all a ploy to make sure people would never support actual deregulation, something that would work. In fact, it has worked quite well in other parts of the world (Great Britain, for instance). But it's probably just ignorance and corruption, both of which the Democrats in California have honed to a fine art.
Go fuck yourself and your straw man too. I never said Lay's crimes didn't have any victims. I didn't even say he wasn't evil. I just said that there are people more evil than him.