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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."
Ted Bundy was polite and charming too.
You're kidding right...? The guy is 64 years old and has been dealing with a high stress situation for 5 years. I don't suppose that could have anything to do with it.
But hey, let's jump to the completely absurd conspiracy assumption as "much more likely" than the fact that "coronary heart disease (CHD) is the single leading cause of death in America." (American Heart Association, 2003 study).
I'll leave open the possibility of suicide, but I think it unlikely. There are far more convenient ways to kill yourself.
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."
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.
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
.. 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!
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
Dear God, for the sake of humanity, please take the rest of those corrupt Republican potato chips!
/sarcasm
PS. God, no need to worry about the Democratic corrupt. We recognize that red-state/blue-state is really the fight between good and evil, and, as such, in times of people losing their entire life's savings and others dying young, the most important thing is whether or not another state switches to my color. GO TEAM GO
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.
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.
Hi. Respect is EARNED.
What value would respect have if it was given freely and equally regardless of what a person is or does? What would be the point. This man was a criminal, and through his direct actions and deceipt harmed thousands of lives. Why should anyone respect that?
Perhaps people should respect his family, but this man dug his grave years ago.
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!
As a human being, I'd like to say the same...
"But this one goes to 11!"
Breakfast served all day!
And how many people's lives did "Kenny-Boy" (GW Bush's nickname for him) destroy with his evil fun? How many people died of heat stroke because their manipulation of energy prices? How many committed suicide because their savingand retirement was wiped out?
He was evil. And the theft he committed was so senseless because he HAD millions, and wanted billions. This was not a man stealing to feed his family, this was an already rich man stealing and more importantly building a huge criminal enterprise and corrupting others to steal far more than any person could ever possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.
He was an evil troll, and I think the possibility exists that his death was faked is credible. He hurt more Americans than Zarqawi, and an honest tally would likely show that he was responsible for more deaths. Pissing on his grave is the least of the insults he deserves. Until these bastards who steal billions actually face the death penalty "business ethics" will remain an oxymoron.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Did Kenny Boy show respect for people who lost their life savings? I am sure there were MANY people who died in similar fashion to Kenny Boy after realizing their life savings were gone. Did he show repect for them? As to their family, his wife KNEW his husband was a fraud and in trouble, did she show respect for others who can't afford to spend millions on their birthday party? Did he kids who financially benefitted GREATLY from their "good ol" dad, return some of their ill-gotten gains to those who lost everything? HELL NO!!! The world is a better place now that Kenny Boy is no longer with us. And if his greedy bastard family is upset about that, so WHAT???
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?
A person who puts all their money into one security isn't investing or saving, they're gambling.
So, when your company handles your 401(k) and your Employee Stock Purchase Program, then urges you by incentives to put more and more of your liquid capitol into the company's sinking stock...because it's such a good deal right now... whose fault is that?
If we're going to treat corporations as people in the eyes of the law, then we should have every right to take punitive action against the "person" who caused all the misery. Enron defrauded stockholders and customers - that means they lied about the actual worth of their stock and assets. Fuck the "should have known better" crowd.
When companies start telling employees to stay out of the ESPP because it's a bad deal, then you can talk about "they should have known better" - but most companies push their own stock on employees like day-old bread, and employees for the most part are content to sit there and lap it up. There's no time or much interest in "individual investing" when companies make it so easy these days.
As a human being, I'd like to say the same...
I admire your humanity and deep sense of empathy.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
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
Irrespective of what he presided over and did, he was a human being.
Well, arguably.
That was a joke.
no matter what sins he committed in life, we should show some respect
Why?
That was serious.
I suppose showing respect to him now would be a good way to piss on the people he defrauded and the society he helped make a little more unjust -- but I guess I don't see why you'd want to that.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Fair enough I suppose. Let he who hath no sin cast the first stone and all that....
In the end, we judge others and actually judge ourselves. The former CEO of Enron was, understandably, a modern type of monster. You're hard-pressed to find much good to say about him other than, "he was human." But so is every death row inmate.
I find the older I get, the more careful I am in judging simply because I've been through a certain amount of crap and I also realize that, as my southern grandfather used to put it, "you gotta walk that lonesome valley.... You gotta walk it by yourself."
Lay emerged on the world scene like the rest of us, and like the rest of us he struggled to climb to the top. Along the way, as most of us do, he compromised. A time came when he compromised big, and then he kept on compromising until that little voice we all have simply wasn't there anymore. He had to know he was destroying lives as he built his personal pile.
I'm reminded of what the news paper tycoon said to the young Orson Wells as his life was ending in public shame, indebtedness and legal turmoil: "my fight with the world is ending. Yours is just beginning."
While the vitriol makes perfect sense right now, we just gotta be careful. We, too, will screw up either in a big or small way in this world. Hopefully, not that big. Still, the man is dead.
Frodo: "It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him when he had the chance."
Gandalf: "Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many."
Let's have a smidgen of pity boys....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
One of the main problems is the enviros in Cal prevented new power plants from being built in the state since the 1970's.
Currently, there are no new plants in CA, no Enron, no blackouts. Since there was only one variable changed, I think I can guess the one most closely correlated with the blackouts.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
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.
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
I suspect what the parent was saying is that Lay caused a lot of problems for the GOP. The economic crisis that he touched off, as well as his ties to the current administration, have caused a lot of heartburn for a party trying to maintain their controlling position.
I, for one, won't really mourn his passing except in the abstract sense (the humanist in me). I'm not a Republican or a Democrat (or a member of any other party), though I am an employee of a company formerly owned by the big E.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Exactly right. Personally, I'm against the death penalty. Rotting in jail for the rest of someone's life, with the only prospect of dying there is worse (or it should be worse).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I disagree. If you kill a person, does it matter if you cut their knife with a throat or ruined them financially so they can't get medical care?
Ken Lay basically died of shame and being caught. I believe that many of his victims died similar deaths to him from his actions.
And I think you are ignoring the fact that Zarqawi probably only *personally* killed less than a hundred people (maybe less than fifty). The rest were all based on his organizations actions. We say he is responsible for the deaths caused by his organization-- I think we can extend deaths caused by corporate actions just as well.
When you knowingly pollute and cover it up and people die, they died.
When you work people to death with excessive hours, they are still dead.
When you take an excessive salary that means your people can't get medical care (which your salary would have covered) then you traded your happiness for their lives and they are still dead.
Historically, we have drawn a line that said if a person dies because of business, then it is not murder. Corporations have become so powerful and so corrupt, that I think it is time to redraw that line.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Superman, is that you? You must have used your x-ray vision to look through the masks of the men in the video footage. Even if Zarqawi claimed responsibility, that's what? Two dead Americans? Versus how many thousands with ruined retirement accounts, millions of dollars lost? We have no way of knowing how many deaths, let alone injuries, Lay's activities caused.
c le/2006/06/09/AR2006060902040_2.html
I'd say it's a safe bet that he injured more than two Americans however. See, I live in California, and I personally have been injured by the actions of Enron, the company Lay oversaw.
Presumably, you have links from the AP regarding these AQ funded labs? I have this link
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
which depicts Zarqawi as wanting to ally himself with AQ, but not being embraced by the terrorist organization's leadership. Furthermore, I have yet to find a mainstream media outlet which claims AQ was operating from Iraq before the war.
There is nothing absurd about calling Republicans traitors, it is indisputable: they seek to undermine the Constitution of the United States, and do not support the Constitution, the document upon which almost all of our laws depend. In so doing, they hope to destroy the United States, and are hence traitors, QED. There is nothing in the Constitution which allows violation of amendments one, five, or six, but there are the Republicans, supporting their violation each and every day.
Traitors all. To paraphrase the Traitor-in-Chief, "you're either with us, or you're with the Republicans."
You don't _have_ to be a traitor, you know. You can always read the Constitution, and educate yourself about this country's founding, and the ideals behind it.
Only one variable changed?
You are ignoring the context of his post. He was responding to a post that essentially blamed "enviros" for the california energy crisis. Since the "enviros" have presumably not gone away, yet the energy crisis is ancient history, it is hardly plausible that the "enviros" were the cause in the first place.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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?