Instead, the guy kicks in his Aspen vacation house, awaiting what was almost certain to be effectively a life sentence. And that would have been straight out of the "couldn't have happened to a nicer guy" file. People who are dumb enough to believe Lay's cynical invocations of God as he left the courthouse that final time in May, are probably also just dumb enough to buy Lay's classic "turnip truck" defense. To believe Lay's defense, you would have to believe that a basically self-made millionaire with a PhD in economics was so in the dark on everything, he allowed himself to get rolled by a cadre of corrupt executives.
Hell, it worked for Reagan, and it's not like Lay had any better options, though I imagine his Lord and Savior would have wanted him to tell the truth. Perhaps I have a different understanding of Christianity than the professionals do.
So now we get the somber replays of Lay's hardscrabble childhood and his road to the top, paved with pelf and greased with connections to various glad-handing sacks of shit, who shall remain nameless for the moment. We get Baba Wawa supposedly musing on the poor boy's chronic stress, as if it weren't entirely self-inflicted.
I don't think Lay was evil, just indifferent to the point of depravity. Like all grifters, he operated from a vantage point of sheer contempt for the marks and rubes he dealt with. It was their fault for being suckers, as if the proles actually had any say in what their supposed betters decided for them in secret meetings and backroom deals. It was the fictitious Grandma Millie's own fault for not knowing that there were slimy cocksuckers in Texas gaming the system, deliberately selling overages on power lines and then having the fucking gall to charge extra to unclog those lines. It was California's fault for producing so much and having so much money there for an enterprising person like Ken Lay to cheat us out of. As P.T. Barnum famously said, it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.
Because I suppose nothing these days appears to be coincidental, upon reading of Lay's death this morning, I couldn't help but think of Frankie Pentangeli (or even Vince Foster) for a second, and of course I wasn't the only one of that mind. It's probably not true, but if we learned anything from the lurid legend of Vince Foster in the '90s, the point is to get the machine in motion and get the lie out there, just to motivate the base. Perhaps the left's base does not operate the same way as the drooling Coulter/Malkin claque, and perhaps it's just that their dirty tricks machine isn't nearly as well-oiled.
Now, assuming that Lay's body is dutifully identified and properly disposed of, let us hope that our professional journamalistas might pull their heads out of their asses and pursue some of the larger loose ends (yeah, right). How about Lay's role in Cheney's so-called Energy Task Force, which we may never be allowed to know about, because apparently we're children? How about Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others, meeting secretly with Lay, in the midst of a crisis engineered mostly by Lay and his associates?
After the California’s energy debacle of 2000, Davis and Bustamante filed suit under California’s unique Civil Code provision 17200, the “Unfair Business Practices Act,” which would order all power companies, including Enron, to repay the nearly $9 billion they extorted from California citizens. The single biggest opponent of the suit, with the most to lose, was Enron’s CEO, Ken Lay.
Lay, a very close friend and long time associate of President Bush and Vice-president Cheney, and one of their largest campaign contributors, hastily assembled a meeting with prominent Californians (confirmed by the release of 34 pages of internal Enron email) to strategize opposition to the Davis-Bustamante campaign and garner influential support for energy deregulation.
Included in the meeting were Michael Milken, “junk bond king” convicted of fraud in 1990 who currently runs a think tank in Santa Monica that focuses on global and regional economies; Ray Irani, Chief Executive of Occidental Petroleum; former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan; and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Riordan and Schwarzenegger were at that time being courted as GOP gubernatorial candidates.)
Attendees of the meeting received a small four-page packet entitled “Comprehensive Solution for California.” The packet called for an end to the federal and state investigations into Enron’s role in California’s energy crisis and proposed saddling consumers with the $9 billion loss. Discussions further focused on preventing Davis’s proposed re-regulation of energy markets.
With Davis in office and Bustamante his natural successor, there would be little chance of dismissing rock-solid charges of fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, fake power delivery scheduling, and blatant conspiracy. The grooming of a governor amenable to a laissez-faire and corrupt energy market was essential. Recalling Davis and replacing him with Schwarzenegger was the solution. With Governor Schwarzenegger in office, Bustamante’s case is dead, as few judges will let a case go to trial to protect a state whose governor has allowed the matter to be “settled.”
It's too bad Jason Leopold's credibility is completely shot, thanks to his asinine "Rove indicted" fake scoop from a couple months ago. One could posit that Leopold got suckered by his source for nefarious reasons, but no matter. The fact is he did a lot of digging on the Enron story back in the day, and it would be nice if the whiny, defensive, narcissistic punks in the corporate media would due diligence for once in their sorry lives and check some of these things out. California's political and financial systems were thrown in complete upheaval by the machinations of scumbags like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, and they were enabled and encouraged by people who are still very much in power.
For once in your stinking lives, you gutless whores, quit your damned starfucking and navel-gazing. Ken Lay was a criminal, a thief. His family does not merit "respect" or kid-glove treatment, any more than a kid that holds up a liquor store should get "respect". Report the fucking story, and then dig deeper. Afflict the comfortable and corrupt, don't be their enabler or sob sister.
And don't forget another untimely death of another former Enron exec: Cliff Baxter had just agreed to testify before Congress against Enron and had hired bodyguards, when he all of a sudden decided to shoot himself in Sugar Land, Texas (home of Tom DeLay) in January 2002.
ReplyDeleteFurther, the police announced that it was a suicide before finishing the investigation, and the body was sent to the funeral home before an autopsy was performed. Just a couple of additional tidbits to keep in mind while sifting the through the multi-billion dollar pile of ungodly slop and excrement known as Enron.
Wait a minute...look over there! It's Monica Lewinsky!
I remember Cliff Baxter, but I didn't know those details about him.
ReplyDeleteI hope people will continue to sift through the Enron pile, but I think we all know better. The media and the public are too lazy, too complacent, too easily distracted. It's too tempting to just let the case be closed.
It's really now up to Skilling to decide whether he wants to come clean with anything he might know, and take any necessary precautions to ensure that it comes out. Other than that, there's not much to hang our hats on -- I pretty much give up on any hope of anyone in the media growing a pair and checking out any or all of these loose ends.