The Death Of "Kenny Boy" By Pirate Joe
8 July 2006
I never knew Ken Lay. He was not one of the kids on
my street, avenue, boulevard, drive or road. Even if he had been, he
is, or rather, was, older than I, so I wouldn't have seen him in grade
school, high school or even college. If he was ever voted as having
"the most greed to succeed", I don't know. Nor did I ever work at the
same place as he: no, all my impressions of the man were formed by his
news making activities at Enron. I remember hearing of Enron in it's
early stages as it gobbled up more companies due to this not-so-new but
yet incredibly stupid idea called "deregulation".
I remember the
"rolling blackouts" in California, and having a sneaky feeling that it
was a ruse to drive up prices. I remember whimpy Governor Gray, who
could have become one of the great heros of our time by calling up
Kenny Boy or Jeff Skilling and telling them "you have those plants back
on line in 12 hours or I'll have the National Guard do it". Then all
those folks who lost everything... But Ken Lay looked like such a nice man..., yes: he did. So does
Osama Bin Ladin.
Despite the protestations of the Ayn Rand Institute,
one of the biggest - no, the
biggest lesson we need to learn here is that this is the result of
untethered capitalism; the bigger we let companies become, the
more limits
we remove, the greater become the temptations to steal, lie and
manipulate, as hundreds of thousands of dollars become millions of
dollars, and as millions of dollars become billions of dollars, etc., and that the larger the company, the
greater the magnitude and effect, of the crime will be, as more
people, dollars and geographic areas are involved. "There's nothing
wrong with being big" - Ronald Reagan, mid 1980's. Oh, yeah? Have we
learned our lesson yet? Here's another one that will send the
one-track-minded capitalism ueber alles types at the Ayn Rand Institute into paroxysms of
self-denial: capitalism
respects no
boundaries, knows no patriotism or nationalistic thoughts: it's goal is
money, period. If the choice is make money or do what is best
for the good old U.S.A., guess which one wins? Hint: it's green, not red, white and blue. (there is a report I read about,
but never managed to get a copy of, in the early 1970's, ostensibly
from a senate investigation, that a well-known U.S. automaker had plans
in place to move their corporate headquarters to Berlin if Germany were
to win World War II , and that they were also profiting from
sales to the Axis power during the war. Aw, what's a little money
between enemies?)
Yet the most interesting phenomenon of this whole
story is the idea that somehow, by dying before serving any of the
prison sentence he would have most certainly received, Kenny Boy has
"gotten off" (?). Really? Folks seem to think that Kenny Boy is having
one side-splitting knee-slapper after another in that coffin of his..
Did anyone stop to think that coffins are to constricted to allow one
to swing one's hands, or for that matter, bend one's knees? Have they
also forgotten that you can't move anything when your dead? Let's take
a moment to grasp the concept: he's dead. D-E-A-D dead. The way it was
before you were born. No light. No darkness. No breathing. No
sentience. No good times. No bad times. No times, period. No
languishing on the decks of a private yacht. No watching a baseball
game on the prison T.V. system. No visits from family or friends. No
letters. No sex. No $1000 bottles of wine. No lavish home. No $3000
dinners for two. No car. No chocolate. No chance of a pardon from W.
Let's not forget what the medical profession has
told us for years: namely, stress is one of the major contributors to
heart attack and stroke. Do you think that being on trial, (especially
one that could send you to prison for the rest of your life) might be a
tad stressful? Kenny Boy did wrong, but he paid for it with his life:
in essence, he got the death penalty. And he got it at an almost
tragically young
( by 21st century standards) age. This is getting off?
Was Kenny Boy an inherently evil man?
Probably not.
Did he start off with the goal of making sure that no little old blue
haired lady would be left with a retirement account from sea to shining
sea? Unlikely. Kenny Boy was just another human being that could
not resist the opiates of big capitalism: the money, the fame, the
power and the opulence. I'm sure he rationalised at every step;
I'm not lying, I'm telling the truth, just in a slightly different
way..... The plain truth of the matter is that as long as we place no
limits on big capitalism, there will be other Kenny Boys; just as 10
new drug dealers pop up for every one that's busted. Would sending
Kenny Boy to prison have helped solve the problem by acting as a
deterrent? You can't say that he didn't deserve it. Yet, it doesn't
work
with drug traffickers, and for the same reason: there's just too much money involved.
We (the people, through our elected representatives)
enabled Enron with deregulation. We set them on the highway, told them
that there was no
speed limit, and (now) we are shocked that they recklessly did whatever
they had to
do to go as fast as they possibly could. Huh? We deregulate more
every
day, and therefore enable and create more Enrons every day. What do you think the future has in store?
The saga of “Kenny Boy” is a modern tragedy of
Shakespearian dimensions, and I’m sure that if the Bard Of Avon could
have but known the story, it would have been an inspiration. Kenny
Boy’s place in history is assured. He couldn’t have flown any higher or
fallen any harder.
-30-