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
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.
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
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
God opted for the death penalty.
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."
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
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.
God for the win!!!
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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."
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!
There goes that theory, unless everyone at the hospital including the coroner is being brought in on the conspiracy.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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!
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
Breakfast served all day!
...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.
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?
Dog is my co-pilot.
The ones who survive have to suffer
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
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
The Republicans are just more blatant about it
Blatant? How about a sitting senator that considers naming everything in West Virginia after himself to be his top priority? That, and having his friends in the road business pave it over with your tax dollars. That is pretty blatant... but it's not nearly as delicious as a congressman with $90,000 in his freezer. No, blatancy is not peculiar to one party or the other.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Ugh! Right where I was planning to dance
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
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Why is it that every time I see someone slam the democrats, the response is usually countering the content of the slam, but when someone slams the republicans, the response is an acusation of blind partisanship, independant of the content of the slam?
(tongue-in-cheek) Maybe it's because Democrats are more apt to use sweeping self-righteous generalizations that need to be pointed out for their hypocrisy? I've just done it twice in two posts. Go me. (harhar).
I'm no Republican. I consider myself squarely libertarian.. and every time I see a $color-stater jump and try to pin issues on $othercolor-staters, when they are all roughly equally guilty, a little piece of me dies. I would do the same for a Republican who blames child-molesting on Democrats. Bad people are bad people, and they need to be rooted out. Pinning it on the "color" your team is playing against because you can't see the forest for the trees is the reason this shit is the way it is. That goes for "corruption", "child-molesting" or "accusations of blind partisainship"
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.
God called. He wants to know where his pension is.
It's all Krista's Fault.
Dude! You miss the point. That's called "trickle down economics."
"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
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.
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
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.
he Ken Lay memorial urinal has a nice ring to it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Oh, c'mon. SOX is in places pretty badly designed, but a good fraction of "standard corporate accounting" is pretty messed up, too, it's not entirely an overreaction to "a few bad apples" like Enron and Worldcom and Liberate and Adephia and Waste Management and Sunbeam and Arthur Andersen and Duke Energy and El Paso and Merrill Lynch and Cendant and Citigroup and Computer Associates and Kmart and Lucent and Tyco and Brystol Myers and Global Crossing and so on. Spend some time looking at how companies account for derivatives and, if you can get through it, you'll start feeling like it's time to buy gold and bury it. Ask yourself how the entire accounting profession could justify saying that it cost nothing to give away stock options for decades, and notice how the politicans tried to rewrite traditionally independent accounting standards the moment the accountants started talking about expensing stock options..
There are certainly high-quality companies out there, managed with responsiblity and integrity. I believe that if you look closely at issues of accounting responsiblity, however, you'll find them in the minority. (I think a majority of companies meet a looser standard, that they believe that they're being responsible, but are missing places where they're taking advantage of irresponsible accounting techniques., e.g., not expensing stock options.)
I'm a nature photographer.
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.
After moving to a better hospital, his condition was upgraded to "alive".
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
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?).
Having a BS in math, I remember a few more things than that. Here, I'll be a smug asshole too: Do you remember what the word "causation" means? Or perhaps the word "relative", or one of the many idioms using said word?
First off, some freak *buying* kiddy porn = some kiddy pornographer making $. Beyond that, I still don't believe in passing the buck. Sure, you could argue advertising revenue, but the causation is just getting weaker and weaker. $5 for a kiddy porn producer does not enable one to abuse children. If you're going by this logic, then next time you buy pretty much anything in most retail stores you should directly turn yourself into the police for forcing 14-hour work days on children in malaysia.
A responsible person doesn't support or enable people who abuse other people. An asshole abuses other people. There's a difference between being irresponsible in stopping problems, and directly causing them.
But for argument's sake, let's say you have a point, and the act of some pedophile looking at kiddy porn, say, puts 50 kids in the hospital. This is still not nearly as bad as the damage Ken Lay did, and Lay doesn't even have the excuse of being mentally deranged in the way most pedophiles are.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
- 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'
"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.
I'd hate for "Kenny-Boy" to get the last laugh on America, you know, by dying early.
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.
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...
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?
Sure, as long as there are laws there will be law-breakers. So, your 'logic' [term used loosely in extremis] dictates that law is ineffective and, therefore, pointless? Nice try.
Now try this: Law can't ensure compliance, (with morals, ethics, etc) but transgression, (followed by apprehension, and adjudication) can ensure loss of freedom, forfeiture of ill-gotten gains, etc, not to mention little 'kickers' like treble damages, civil suit vulnerabilities, etc.
A few formerly-rich, Republican white guys, doing time, kissing their golden years 'goodbye' (and some caged-heat weiners, "Hello"), will give the chicken shit (greedy, usurious, larcenous, etc) opportunists... pause.
You lackey 'mouthpieces' for the laissez-faire, special-interest corporate-welfare assholes never give up, do you? Just consider taking it up the ass in the joint )against your will, for a change) before putting your so-called libertarian bullshit into practice.
Have a nice compliant day. :=)
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.