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Last updated on March 6th, 2018 at 12:31 am
Enron founder Ken Lay has died at 64.
UPDATE. Also departed: ABC presenter John Hinde.
- Karl Rove never sleeps, so who do you think it was, Mr or Mrs. Smith?Posted by moptop on 2006 07 05 at 11:15 AM • permalink
- Oh how the high and mighty are falling left right and centre eh???
in O/T news a certain sheik has been told to go queue for the dole as well coz their ain’t no more money to pay him… for doing whatever he pretended to be doing…. on a brighter note he has claimed he would prefer to die 100 times over than stand in line seeking welfare… which is a very un-islamic stance if recent widespread welfare parasitism by potential nutbag bombers is anything to go by….
unfortunately its a promise about as likely to be carried out as all those moonbats who threatened to move to Canada if Bush won the 2004 election….
but back to Lay, i think the happier parts of his life were probably behind him, so his exiting stage left probably isn’t such bummer… the people who lost all their life savings and had their lives ruined is who i feel most sorry for….
John Hinde seemed to be on his last legs for a while, so at 92 and after a good innings, he doesn’t have much to complain about….
- Nonsense. Ken Lay is in Bolivia where he will live out his remaining years as Juan Luis Jesus Gutierrez.
Good one, rh.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 07 05 at 01:51 PM • permalink
- casanova – Oh I think the Shiek will have no problem getting funds from, er… other sources.Posted by Stop Continental Drift! on 2006 07 05 at 01:51 PM • permalink
- No mind-body dichotomy with Kenneth Lay. No siree, he was shot through with cowardice. Twas fear that stopped Mr. Lay’s heart.
Loved the Sheik story. It is fascinating to see the problems of the enemy. And they have many. You can spout all the mysticism you want, extolling the virtues of going splodydope, but if you want to eat in the real world, it takes money.
- Als, apparently, lefty blogger David Heidelberg.Posted by Evil Pundit on 2006 07 05 at 03:02 PM • permalink
- So, it I get this right, Lay destroyed the pensions of the vast majority of his employees. Those pensions were made up largely of the falsely inflated stock of Enron itself. And to add insult to injury, the stock collapsed before these same employees had the opportunity to fob the worthless paper off on someone else? Oh yeah, the rest of those injured were making bets with money that all adults playing in markets had better know were at risk of being lost. I just want to be clear on where the outrage comes from.
Enron amounted to an economic blip. Lots of businesses fail. It’s how the economy knows whether the resources tied up in that business would be better deployed elsewhere. Enron was an experimental business model that failed.
- Interesting too, that for all the efforts of Democrats to hang Lay around Bush’s neck like that albatross in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he was a supporter of Kyoto. Any scheme which distorts markets and makes opportunities to cash in on producing nothing for the politically connected (he had bought his way into the Clinton Administration) was alright with him.
The whole UN Oil For Food scandal, which was perverted into a “cash for genocide” program by businessmen throughout Europe was a much more hideous crime. And one in which those who suffered the most had no say but to take it or die, maybe take it and die. What invective do you reserve for those guys?
What invective do you reserve for those guys?
They can burn in hell with hot pokers up their asses.
Honestly, the fact that there are bigger scumbags than Ken Lay doesn’t make Ken Lay any less of a scumbag. And I think that characterizing Enron simply as “an experimental business model that failed” is rather charitable, to say the least.
- modop – keep in mind that Enron and it’s “outside” auditors certified false statements of the company’s assets and risk exposure, and that some months before the collapse Enron sent its employees glowing reports on the likely growth of its stock and strongly and repeatedly encouraged them to keep their 401Ks invested in Enron, and that Ken Lay, among other executives, then sold their OWN stock, and that very shortly after that, Enron locked down the company 401K program—ostensibly a temporary outage (to facilitate an upgrade) that turned into forever—preventing any of their employees from making any changes to their own Enron investments…
I agree there are no guaranteed returns in the stock market, but there are rules and with this series and depth of abuse of those rules, I find I can rustle up some outrage on behalf of the employees AND investors.
- #10:
“Interesting too, that for all the efforts of Democrats to hang Lay around Bush’s neck like that albatross in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he was a supporter of Kyoto.”
Not only that, it was Enron that first proposed the protocol’s BS emissions trading scheme. Except I think that the pre-chapter 11 proposal involved sending money to Russia via Enron instead of simply sending money to Russia.
- Will miss old Hinde, he allways seemed to be a good sort.Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2006 07 05 at 08:09 PM • permalink
- What bothers me about this is that the big supporter of Enron on an international basis was President Clinton. He sent his trade minister Mickey Kantor along with the Enron salespeople to meet with the leaders of the countries overseas. The Commerce Secretary was also instrumental in these matters. Enron was a big supporter of Gray Davis, the democratic governor of California who was kicked out in favor of Arnie. Yet all the media reports go out of their way to try to hook up Bush and Enron. Lay supported Bush with donations but he supported Clinton with bigger donations but you will never see that in the media.
However you spell it, the man was a total scumbag and so was his partner in crime Skilling. They screwed the public and they really screwed all the people who believed in them and worked so hard to make the company succeed. That these two scumbags saw to it that their pension plans were filled with worthless stock while they sold all theirs on the open market before the truth about Enron came out and before Andersen Consulting published the false valuations should tell you all you need to know about them.
- #22 – you’re thinking of Frank Pentangeli – “Frankie Fiveangels”. He took over after Clemenza died of natural causes – probably too many canoli.Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2006 07 05 at 08:38 PM • permalink
- You know, we all gets our nuts in a knot over Enron pissing up billions of (willing investors’) dollars against the wall but miss the point that governments of both hues tend to piss it in such volume as to make Enron look like Uncle Scrooge.
Just a point with, perhaps, no point.
Posted by Jack Lacton on 2006 07 05 at 08:44 PM • permalink
- OT: His arseholiness Mufti El- Hilarity has lost his $40,000 a year and has been told to join the dole queue to which his response is that he would rather die a 100 deaths.
Pity none of the other faithful have any problems in accepting baksheesh from the infidels.
#10:
“Interesting too, that for all the efforts of Democrats to hang Lay around Bush’s neck like that albatross in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he was a supporter of Kyoto.”
Not only that, it was Enron that first proposed the protocol’s BS emissions trading scheme. Except I think that the pre-chapter 11 proposal involved sending money to Russia via Enron instead of simply sending money to Russia.
A friend of mine has a serious hate-on for SUVs. The mere thought of them enrages him beyond reason. To him, SUVs are evil; their owners are evil, greedy, and/or stupid; and governments should do everything in their power to tax this demonic menace back to hell. I wouldn’t really like to own an SUV myself; but when the subject comes up, I usually defend the consumer’s right to choose a type of vehicle that they feel meets their needs.
Anyway; in his last rant, my friend brought up a new point: SUV owners are responsible for the Enron scandal. I tried to point out that Enron were a huge, diversified company; that they had interests in all types of energy, including alternative energy; and that anyway, the industries Enron were involved with were not the cause of the massive corruption and fraud within the company. He wouldn’t hear a word of it: without America’s legions of stupid, ignorant, and greedy SUV drivers (I must point out that this guy is neither anti-American, nor left-wing (although he does tend to be statist on many issues)), the Enron scandal would never have happened.
I didn’t know about Ken Lay’s support for Kyoto, or Enron’s involvement in the creation of the emissions trading scheme. But if I had brought those facts up, I doubt that they would have changed my friend’s mind.
- #30
Where’s the islamophobia ? AFIC are going bust and can’t pay their bills, so they are cutting staff. Doesn’t mean we can’t point and laugh….Posted by Steaming Plateful on 2006 07 05 at 10:12 PM • permalink
- #19
I think he will get 72 women who are pretending to be virgins.
Or even better, 72 virgins who are pretending to be women…..Posted by Steaming Plateful on 2006 07 05 at 10:14 PM • permalink
- I would prefer to face death 100 over than have to shave my body hair off 100 times over in order to face the deaths that I am prepared to face 100 times over.Posted by Whale Spinor on 2006 07 05 at 10:43 PM • permalink
- i’m no great lover of extended dole bludgers of any stripe poll… the fact that a number of them are then caught alledgely planning to kill innocent aussies while feeding from the public trough just makes it that much worse…
and as usual its turns out they were not a representative cross section of australians, nor was the recent case in canada, nor in england last year (in fact they never are)….
seeing these events are not random or unconnected, that their is a definite trend developing in terms of the backgrounds of members of a certain religious/cultural group means that at some point people picking up on and stating the obvious, about certain members of this particular religious/cultural group seeming to be overly represented in this type of sh*t, is not the fault of the general public, but of the perpertrators themselves and their supporters…
the day that eskimoes or various other groups also start this nonsense i will make my comments of a more generalised nature… in the mean time if the mufti can impress his distaste of our welfare system on more of his followers, i’m sure the australian taxpayers will be more than grateful….
- and by the way poll, can you take your stupid buzzwords such as the now very much in vogue “islamophobia” and stick it up your clacker jerkoff….
i am ready to give anyone a fair go in most cases… but after any particular group shats in its own nest enough times, they eventually reach a tipping point from most people giving them the benefit of the doubt until proven other wise, to the opposite…
once again its then up to that particular group to take actions to rebuild or enhance their credibility and standing in the community, not for everyone else to go around with their heads up their posterior… like u seem to be very comfortable with…
- Yooouuuu-hoooooo drpoll @ # 30. that wouldn’t be Kayser Trad, Apologist in Chief for the Muslims in Australia, hiding there would it?
*Apologist for muslim terrorist outrages worlwide;
* Apologist for muslim human rights disgraces (female circumcision, female rights in general, we all know the list)
* Defender of any behaviour as long as the perpetrator is a muslim.We really love ya and your kinfolk Kayser, its just the killing and mutilation bits that we’d like your lot to tone down (actually eliminate or even speak out against, in your case), OK?
Posted by Stop Continental Drift! on 2006 07 05 at 11:55 PM • permalink
- 36. Casanova, I believe its called “compassion fatigue”. We try to make every excuse possible for a group’s incessant (self) marginalization, because at the end of the day we ultimately want them to succeed (at decent non-murderous civilization in the case of Islam), so we can all go home and enjoy life. When the marginalization behavior finally becomes intolerable and we merely comment, our reward is having our motives impuned and being called every name in the book by idiots like drtroll. Ain’t gonna change.Posted by Vanguard of the Commentariat on 2006 07 06 at 12:05 AM • permalink
- The Mufti will likely find himself up a creek in discussions with Centrelink. His management makes the dumb mistake of stating, in writing, that future payments to him, when funds are unblocked, will be reduced by any amounts he has received from Centrelink.
Buzzzz: WRONG!
Given that he will, by that statement, be given back pay, or paid in retrospect (which is how most of us are paid), it is Centrelink who will be reducing potential payments by the amount that will be paid by his employer, not the other way around (dick heads!). Income has to be declared at the time of earning, not at the time of receipt.
Me thinks Mufti is ineligible, period.
- if the Mufti won’t come to the molehill, the molehill must go to the Mufti…or something
(btw, Whale Spinor—I have preserved in formaldahyde those portions of my trachea I could salvage from the monitor after reading your post at #34, they are yours as trophies should you wish)
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 07 06 at 02:05 AM • permalink
- RIP John Hinde. A fine presenter and a good chap.Posted by Simon Darkshade on 2006 07 06 at 05:01 AM • permalink
- Texas Bob, and the rest:
You are trying to talk sense to nonsense. drpoll has shown him/herself to have willfully severed the correlation between reality and thought. In the bizarro world he inhabits, Muslims are the underdog and that gives them, a la Ma Sheehan, an unassailable right to splodydope all over women, children, and other innocents, saw heads, torture, and generally take out their hatreds, frustrations, envy, and all the other evils flowing from the way they think, out on everyone who isn’t them (and many, many, who are). It matters not to drpoll that they have put themselves in the position of underdog; that they have had the wealth of 50 years to bring themselves into the modern world and have, instead, indulged themselves in an atavism the world hasn’t seen since the fall of Rome and the onset of the European Dark Ages. He cannot see that his own existense is anathma to the side he has chosen. I wonder if people such as drpoll even understand that they have taken the side of a group of people who would enslave him at best, and saw his head off after weeks of horror and torture at worst. I’m really beginning to recent the fact that such people nag at me to leap into the abyss with them. They are stepping on my last nerve.
- #38 Kaboom
Zounds ! Plaster that one up around the ME and you’d solve the martyr/suicide bomber problem overnight.
Forgive my ignorance, but who (or what) is that ? It looks like a corpse…..Posted by Steaming Plateful on 2006 07 06 at 06:26 AM • permalink
- debo.v2
Like you said, they told their employees that the stock was good, denying employees the opportunity to fob the losses off on others while senior management did manage to rob others. But did they really? If they had been honest, would the employees not still have lost their jobs and investments as the stock would have crashed at that time? I thought I dealt with that issue in the original post.
Kruggers, former Enron flack, and now columnist for the NYT claimed that the Enron collapse would be bigger than 9-11.
Like I said, it was a blip, excuse me if I am just sick of hearing one distortion after another about Enron.
- #15 R C Dean
So if he intentionally induced a heart attack to keep his wife from being rendered penniless, is he still a coward?
But that would be the perfect excuse for doing himself in and not spending the rest of his life in a federal prison, and right in line with everything Lay has done to impress the impressinable, and otherwise make himself look like something he is was not – a decent man.
moptop,
I sympathize. But calling what happened a “business model that failed” stretches the language too far. These people actively engaged in CYA ploys for several years. Lay and his cohorts even went to the trouble of putting on phony vignettes of meetings for companies that didn’t exist, as a show for people outside of the company. You don’t do that sort of thing if you are honest. Lay was an economist with years of experience in the business world; he knew better.
But Lay thought he was smarter than everyone else. Didn’t he pull the wool over the eyes of top politicians. Didn’t he have the top accounting firm doing his bidding? He thought that he could fake it. Like a crazed gambler robbing Peter to pay Paul, he thought that if he could hold out until this or that happened that he could get away with it. And that is the key idea behind it all: he thought he could get away with it
The worst he did was be one of the reasons behind one of the most obnoxious and damaging new assaults against business since anti-trust. What he did against his shareholders and employees was bad enough, but the consequences to business of his actions are much more agregious than even that. If you respect the right of people to own and run a business, or invest in a business without undue interference of the government, you can’t be standing up for a crook that makes doing business more difficult for innocents.
- #48 Steaming – That horrorhead, my friend, is the redoubtable Helen Thomas.
Hit by the Ugly Stick at birth, needs to be hit with the Cluebat.
- Still trying to work out the real connection between the death of criminal Lay (not to soon either) and what is in effect an internal financial matter for the Muslim faith in a small rather irrelevant country. #3 Seems like a spite posting..
52/53.. Ooohh Dearie Me A spelllung (sick) mistak.. Better turn your “Mento-spello Czechers” on to all posts on this bhlog.
- drpull, no matter how you spell it, an ijit is still an ijitPosted by MentalFloss on 2006 07 07 at 02:44 AM • permalink
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