Thursday, July 06, 2006

"Ken Lay was a wonderful, kind-hearted generous man. We are all suffering from a broken heart." Oh boo hoo hoo!

The quote above, evidently comes from a member of the Pabst beer family, one of the kind-hearted pals of Ken.

I gotta tell ya man, I'm weeping crocodile tears here. I know, I know, it's supposedly not nice to speak ill of the dead. But simple morality requires that we do it all the time. I mean, are we supposed to say nice things about Joe Stalin because he's dead? How about Adolph Hitler?

In Italy, after they shot Mussolini and his mistress, they hung them upside down by their feet and let them rot in public for a while. Any complaints? So why is anybody upset about complaints that Ken didn't even get a chance to rot in a prison cell?

The latest medical theory is that stress caused Ken-Boy (That's George Bush's nickname for this pet crook of his, not mine) to croak. But Ken-Boy Lay caused thousands of former Enron employees and others to lose their retirement nesteggs through his duplicity and double dealing.

So if you want to talk about stress, imagine trying to get along on $1,000 or so a month worth of Social Security income and nothing else because the kind-hearted Ken Lay and his pals ate your pension. That's stress-inducing enough to kill ya.

Imagine being 80 years old and not having enough money to pay your rent, or your mortgage, or your heat bill. That's stress-inducing enough to kill ya, if you don't freeze to death first.

Imagine falling into the "Drug Benefit" "doughnut hole" and cutting your blood pressure or cholesterol-control pills in half because you can't afford a full dose. That could kill ya even without the stress.

But that's what warmhearted Ken has done to some of his former employees and stockholders. To the end, the bitter, rotten end, he was lying through his teeth -- denying he had done anything wrong and feigning ignorance about how the company he managed actually worked. He even lied about his assets, claiming to be broke and $250,000 in debt. Turns out he had $6 million plus a couple of million bucks worth of real estate, give or take a few fat fistsfull of dollars.

The only thing the late Ken Lay deserves is to have the thousands of Enron ripoff victims line up to pee on his grave.

(Note to Beelzebub: Listen, Bro, when you run into Ken-Boy down there, do me a favor. Take that pitchfork of yours and give him an extra jab in the butt for me.)

For more on Ken-Boy: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/business/06enron.html

2 comments:

Buce said...

First-round conspiracy theories:

1) His wife did it for the insurance money (potassium fakes heart attacks; check the banana supply)

2) The Bushies did to keep him quiet.

3) Nobody did it; he is alive and drinking rum from a coconut shell.

The New York Crank said...

Actually, I'm perfectly willing to believe the coroner's report that it was a heart attack. But here's another theory I've had: He did it to prevent the government from seizing his $6 million in liquid assets and his houses. At least this way his wife could have them. And another cockeyed theory: He did it just because he was too cowardly to face prison.

Actually, i like the fake death/coconut shell idea a lot, too. Where is the National Enquirer when we really need a photograph of a famous dead body?