7/6/2006As you must know by now, Ken Lay, the man facing hard time for being the chief architect of one of the most devastating corporate malfeasance scandals in human history, has died. Before I make any comments and in the spirit of fairness, I am reprinting the
entire obituary which ran in
The New York Times the other day. It is rather lengthy and, more importantly, dull and boring, so feel free to "skim" through it if you like.
Here it is…I'll see you on the other side!
Kenneth L. Lay, 64, Enron Founder and Symbol of Corporate Excess, Dies
Kenneth L. Lay, the son of a Baptist preacher in rural Missouri who rose to the pinnacle of corporate America as head of Enron before becoming a symbol of corporate excess, died yesterday in Aspen, Colo. He was 64.
The cause of death was coronary artery disease, a forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy, Dr. Rob Kurtzman, told reporters yesterday in Grand Junction, Colo.
Mr. Lay's sudden death — family and friends say he did not have a history of heart disease — came six weeks after he was convicted of 10 charges of conspiracy, fraud and lying to banks and almost four months before he was to be sentenced for those crimes. He faced years in prison.
As the chief executive of Houston Natural Gas in 1985, Mr. Lay helped engineer the company's merger with InterNorth of Omaha; the combined company would be named the Enron Corporation a year later. Enron went on to become the nation's seventh-largest company, pioneering and dominating the trading of natural gas and electricity. But in December 2001, the company collapsed amid accounting scandals.
Kenneth Lee Lay was born in April 15, 1942, in Tyrone, Mo., the second of three children of Omer and Ruth Lay. His family moved frequently during his childhood as his father, a lay preacher, tried to establish himself in various trades and business ventures.
When Mr. Lay was 6, the family's fledging chicken business was wiped out when a large shipment of birds was killed in a truck accident. He learned the value of money early, supplementing the family's meager income by delivering newspapers, cutting grass and baling hay.
Those childhood lessons would be reinforced when he studied economics under the tutelage of Pinkney Walker, an economics professor at the University of Missouri who became his mentor.
In the late 1960's, Mr. Lay landed his first real job, with the Houston-based Humble Oil and Refining, later part of Exxon. As one executive responsible for setting up Humble Oil's corporate development department, Mr. Lay received what seemed a princely salary of $13,000 a year. It was around this time that he married his college girlfriend, Judith Ayers. They had two children.
While working at Humble, Mr. Lay began to pursue a doctorate in night school at the University of Houston. Then, with the draft board back in Missouri eager to get hold of him, Mr. Lay applied to the Navy's officer candidate school in Rhode Island and was accepted, heading out in January 1968. That led to his first experience in Washington; after officers' school, he was assigned to the Pentagon as an economist.
When his time in the military was up, Mr. Lay was preparing to return to the corporate world when he heard from Mr. Walker, who had been named by President Richard M. Nixon to the Federal Power Commission. Mr. Walker persuaded his star student to join him as his technical assistant.
After Washington, Mr. Lay did return to the business world, leaving for a job at the Florida Gas Corporation. His next big break came in 1981, when he moved to Houston, a city that would remain his home for decades to come. There, he joined a larger pipeline company, Transco, as president and chief operating officer.
The 1980's was a decade of crucial developments in Mr. Lay's life. It was then that he would marry his second wife, create Enron and forge ties to political leaders. In 1981, as his first marriage was failing, he followed a former boss to Transco, a pipeline company in Houston. He later married Linda Phillips Herrold, who had once been his secretary at Florida Gas.
When Mr. Lay was at Transco, many of the pipeline industry's financial contracts at the time were built on a faith that oil prices would continue rising; the arrangements required the companies to buy a set percentage of a gas well's production, at preset, ever-increasing rates.
But when oil prices fell in the early 80's, the cost of gas dropped, too, leaving the pipeline companies on the hook for buying fuel at excessive prices. The problem hit Transco hard. So Mr. Lay corralled a group of Transco analysts, and urged them to play around with a new idea: setting up a spot market for gas, which would allow producers to sell the gas directly to customers — taking the pipeline operators and distributors out of the middle.
The idea was a rollicking success and alleviated Transco's financial bind. Mr. Lay emerged as something of a legend in the industry, a man who had transformed near certain disaster into a new business. Plenty of other companies sat up and took notice.
By May 1984, Mr. Lay was approached by a smaller rival, Houston Natural Gas, or H.N.G., about taking over the company as chairman and chief executive. He took the job, assuming the helm of a major corporation for the first time at the age of 42.
In less than a year, H.N.G. was on the path to becoming Enron. Internorth, an Omaha energy company, was fighting off a corporate takeover and, as a defensive maneuver, approached Mr. Lay about merging the two companies. Mr. Lay was intrigued, and on May 2, 1985, the merger of the two companies was announced. The merged company became loaded down with high-interest debt, used to finance the deal.
By 1986, after some internal struggles, Mr. Lay was fully in charge of the company, which by then had been rechristened Enron.
At Enron, Mr. Lay recruited Jeffrey K. Skilling, a McKinsey & Company consultant, in 1988 and the two began moving it away from its staid pipeline business and pushed it deeper into trading, first in natural gas and later in electricity.
As he moved up the ranks of Houston's business elite, Mr. Lay also made connections in the city's deep political pool. He would establish a close relationship with Vice President George H. W. Bush, making large campaign contributions and heading critical committees. He was co-chairman of Mr. Bush's 1992 re-election committee and the chairman of the Republican National Convention held in Houston that year.
His relationship with the Bush family was solidified in July 1990, when Mr. Lay helped to orchestrate the World Economic Summit in Houston at the request of the first President Bush. What had seemed to be an organizational mess before Mr. Lay stepped in proved to be an international showcase.
Mr. Lay continued his close contact with Washington — remaining close friends with Mr. Bush, later golfing with President Bill Clinton, and eventually establishing a close relationship with George W. Bush, while he was the governor of Texas.
When the younger Mr. Bush set off on his quest to win the 2000 presidential election, Mr. Lay served as a major player, playing host at big fund-raisers and contributing plenty of his own money to the effort. After Mr. Bush won the election, Mr. Lay was considered for the job of Treasury secretary, but was passed over.
Still, there was no disguising his close relationship to the Bush family; at the inauguration, the first President Bush and his wife flew to Washington with Mr. Lay on an Enron corporate plane. Mr. Lay's survivors, all of Houston, include his wife, Linda; a son, Mark; a daughter, Elizabeth Vittor; and three stepchildren, Robyn Lay, Beau Herrold and David Herrold.
People who found themselves on the other side of Mr. Lay's goals and ambitions found him determined, strong-willed and effective. Curtis L. Hébert Jr., the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, frequently disagreed with Mr. Lay on how much and how quickly the nation should deregulate electricity markets.
Neither convinced the other, but Mr. Lay did not have to. His Republican colleagues frequently outvoted Mr. Hébert.
"Ken Lay was a charming fellow and always presented himself as such, even though we didn't agree," Mr. Hebert said. "I think that was part of his success."
It was, perhaps, also part of his eventual failure.
Bill Burton, a Texas lawyer who had known Mr. Lay for more than 10 years, compared Mr. Lay to Icarus, the figure in Greek mythology who was given wings made of feather and wax but fell into the sea when he flew too close to the sun.
"The Enron and Ken Lay stories are best told in an English literature class, or a classics class," Mr. Burton told an interviewer in 2002, "where you are trying to explain what hubris is all about."
By Vikas Bajaj and Kurt Eichenwald
OK. OK. You caught me. I
did add the pictures, but the text is untouched and in tact. Just check the
The New York Times link if you don't believe me.
After you are done verifying the prose, ask yourself this question: Do my visual aids make a point?
Totally dissatisfied with The Times, and all the other articles I saw in other various newspapers and periodicals, I decided to pen Kenny-Boy's epitaph myself…and it goes something like this:
Kenneth L. Lay, 64, Piece of Fecal Matter, Enron Founder and Symbol of Everything Wrong with Our Society, Dies
Kenneth L. Lay, died yesterday of a supposed artery disease in Aspen, Colorado according to some quack on the administration's payroll. He was 64.
Born the son of a Baptist preacher in rural Missouri on April 15, 1942, the second of three children of Omer and Ruth Lay, Mr. Lay had completely turned his back on Christ, God and the Holy Church at a very young age.
Kenneth Lee Lay learned the value of money early, supplementing the family's meager income by delivering newspapers, committing arson-for-hire, cutting grass, running numbers for the local syndicate and baling hay.
At the age of 14, he joined the Boy Scouts and thought up his first Ponzi scheme. In a grotesque distortion of free market economics, Lay fleeced his whole troop out of their allowances and lunch money by convincing them of the economic soundness of his plan which he called "The Airplane Game."
At the age of 16 Mr. Lay killed his first man.
By 18, Mr. Lay was able to leave home and establish himself with the money he "earned" from his involvement in what local authorities would later call "The great St. Louie horse doping scam of 1950."
At 25, Mr. Lay discovered that he enjoyed kicking small dogs, specifically cocker spaniels. In one of his last interviews, he stated that he found "…the sounds of cute and cuddly little animals painfully yelping completely intoxicating."
In his 30s and 40s, Mr. Lay spent most of his time, snorting cocaine, drinking hard liquor and banging whores. He would later describe this period as, "the happiest time of my life."
Lay worked for, and ran, many companies between 1970 and 2001 making a lot of money…a whole lot of money…as he defecated on the ordinary consumer. Co-workers and acquaintances at these firms nick-named him "Mr. Excretion" because of the sheer joy he would express every time he lined his pockets with cash as a direct result of his urination on the unsuspecting public who just naturally assumed that a big businessman was acting in their best interest.
But the crowning achievement of Mr. Lay's sadistic life was undeniably the spectacular hosing he gave his own loyal employees at Enron.
There Mr. Lay, and a gaggle of executive shit heads who all sold their souls to the devil many years earlier, extensively cooked the books so that Enron, essentially a teetering house of cards, appeared stable to the common workers. These basically middle class people were then encouraged, if not out right forced, to invest their retirement plan funds back into the company. As their underlings bought, Lay and friends not being stupid men, sold the de facto worthless stock clearing hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves. When the rubber band finally stretched to tight and broke, the work force was left holding the bag.
One night, thousands of Enronites went to bed financially secure with a twinkle in their eye and woke up the next morning with absolutely nothing in their pockets and dreading the future.
Mr. Lay would say afterwards that the American public should thank him because he created a whole new demographic: Formally secure middle aged people who would now have to spend their golden years washing toilets and praying to Christ for next month's rent money.
He is survived by two jackals, three vultures and a hyena.
Now that's what I call an accurate and factual portrayal!
Now, before you get your draws stuck all up in the crack of your ass,
I know I made up about 90 percent of the events depicted in my version. And I know Kenny Boy didn't like "kicking small dogs" or "kill a man" at the age of 16.
At least I don't think he did.
But regardless, do you see what I am trying to say? Reread The Times obit and tell me if that reflects the
essence of a man who single handedly destroyed the lives of thousands of people? Besides from an almost whimsical self-congratulatory reference to Icarus, does any passage, senrtence, or even a word, in that paint by numbers dogshit piece give you the feeling that this was not a nice man whose unabashed greed fucked up a lot of human beings? How can the term "Liberal Press" be said with a straight face after reading such a thing?
After reading the article, I had to check the headline to see if it was really about Kenny-Boy.
I thought The Pope might have died.
And speaking of guys who get killed for knowing too much, I honestly hope one of these truth seekers...the ones on Rush Limbaugh et al who back in the 90s accused Clinton of having Vince Foster murdered...look into what actually happened to Lay. Man, oh man, they must be really pissed now.
Of course I have absolutely no proof but if you are going to tell me that a member of the inner circle of one of the most corrupt and contemptible administrations dies unexpectedly on the eve of serving possibly the rest of his life in prison, I am
not thinking natural causes.
I'm thinking Cheney…in the Drawing Room…with a bottle of Drano.
Go get them fellas!!!
No. They probably won't be too outraged. There probably won't be much inquisitiveness or investigation. Hey the coroner said it was natural causes, so it was natural causes. Why are you so cynical? Why do you hate America?
Oh well, I guess I'll just have to wait for Oliver Stone to go down that road.
On a side note...
Does anyone else think that Norman Rockwell was possibly insane?
Larry
