Professor Smartass: ken lay

Showing posts with label ken lay. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

King of Cayman Islands thanks Bush for Wall St. Bailout

The Cayman Islands formally thanked the United States for the first installment of the $350 billion Wall Street bailout.

"Just about all that money ended up in our banks, Mon," said king of the Caymen Islands and president of the Third National Bank of Post Office Box 7, Haile Ken Lay Selassie.

The Cayman Islands are notorious for their secret bank accounts used to escape individual and corporate taxes and launder drug money to make it available to banks and Wall St.

"We got about $348 billion. Hank Paulson, and the AIG and the Goldman Sachs, or whoever those guys are, they said they need the other two for shipping and handling--shipping coke and handling male prostitutes that do that nasty shit they like from their fraternity initiations. Mon, those guys are fucked up, but they make us so rich, we don't know what to do with all the money. I got a solid gold bidet to wash the shit off me ass so I don't even have to wipe myself. Even my paperboy, he drive a Rolls Royce, and our homeless can afford to hire advertising companies to beg for them."

The bailout money will be used to actually expand the land mass of the Cayman Island. "We gonna bale up that bale out money and throw it in the ocean to make the island bigger, so we put some more PO boxes on it."

The King of the Cayman Islands bears a striking resemblance to Enron CEO Ken Lay who died suddenly after being sentenced to prison for his business practices. Some suspected he faked his death and was hiding out in one of the corporate-criminal friendly states like Seychelles, Saudi Arabia, or the Cayman Islands.

"Mon, I aint no Ken Lay, I got some white in me, so maybe we are cousins or some shit like that. But I'm no way Ken Lay with a bad dreadlock wig and dyed skin."

What makes the resemblance even more odd is that the king's middle name is "Ken Lay."

He has a quick explanation for that. "Look, how am going to know when someone is talking to me when half the people in the islands is named Haile Selassie or Bob Marley something? So I put my real name in the middle so people still call me "Kenny Boy,"or the "Easy Lay," but no feds can find me with the Selassie, not that they are looking so hard with my friend the Lucky Tard as president."

As president of the Third National Bank of Post Office Box 7, the king is thought to have stewardship of 90% of the money that disappeared from the collapse of Enron, 70% of the money from the S& L crisis in the 80's, and the majority of the heroin income from Afghanistan and coca income from Columbia.

"I don't know why anyone would want to be a CEO of some fancy business in the US and have to wear a tie and all that shit," the king said. "I make a lot more money here smoking blunts in me flip flops and driving me golf cart to collect the checks from the mailboxes every day. Even club fed wouldn't have been this nice."

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

BBC's Greg Palast gives me a message for LA Times editor on Arnold/Enron news blackout

On Mar 19, 2005, at 10:57 PM Professor Smartass wrote:

Greg,

I recently wrote a letter to the LA Times asking why they haven't been more aggressive in covering Arnold's relationship to Enron and the other energy scammers, and attached the project censored coverage of your story. The editor disputed some of the basic facts about Cruz Bustamante even filing a lawsuit, and Arnold having the ability to make it go away.

You can see the LA Times letter and my original letter at http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/

-- Professor Smartass

______________________________________

From: contact@gregpalast.com
Subject: Re: LA Times disputes Arnold/Enron story
Date: March 29, 2005 12:54:51 PM PST

Hi Professor Smartass,
Greg has written a response which he would you to post or sent to this LA Times guy.
Thanks for making us aware of it.
Kindest regards,
LENI

Here's Greg's comment:

The LA Times editor misreads my exposé on your governor's undermining of the legal action against Enron and other power pirates (or, typical of editors, he commented without reading it).

I'm not surprised. This is a highly complex matter involving regulatory financial accounting and the nexus of regulatory and tort law. It is not the expertise one normally finds in a typical newsroom where almost all matter printed comes from simplified press releases and official statements.

While best known for my TV and popular writings, I am, in another life, an expert on electricity finances and law, author of a seminal work in the area, Democracy and Regulation, introduced by California Public Utilities Commissioner Carl Wood, based on my lectures at the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge University, England, and the University of Sao Paolo.

The Times editor says his reporters have reviewed much energy-related "stuff" -- and could not find these stories. Indeed, the Times missed the entire Enron story until they could re-print the discoveries of the Wall Street Journal.

I sympathize with the Times limitations in this area; which is why it may be unfair that my team won a journalism award for this story from California State University and not the Times.

As one newspaper wrote in an embarrassingly glowing profile of my reporting, "Palast's ability to make sense of stacks of dense financial data earned him a reputation for doggedness (he holds an MBA from the University of Chicago)."

It was in the LA Times.

Greg Palast
Author, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." View Palast's reports for BBC TV at www.GregPalast.com

arnold schwarzenegger ken lay enron greg palast blackout blackmail recall president george w bush racketeering deregulation girly man girlie man terminator republican GOP conservative corruption professor smartass gray davis governor lies peak oil propaganda corporation fascism los angeles times david lauter nazi smartass comments resistance censored news rebel

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

final rounds of Arnold/Enron debate with LA Times editor

David.Lauter@latimes.com
RE: Your defense of Arnold/Enron coverage
Date: March 21, 2005 3:14:50 PM PST

Re Bustamante's suit: He sued as an individual, not on behalf of the state, so there's not much that Schwarzenegger could do to settle the case, whether he wants to or not. (There also may not be much to come of the suit since it's not on behalf of the state.) Lockyer has a number of proceedings in which he's been pursuing the energy companies and has actually gotten some large settlements. No one's likely to get much money out of Enron since it's bankrupt.

Re the broader issue: You can only connect the dots, as you put it, if there's actual evidence. We've had a number of reporters scrub through all sorts of energy-related stuff several times, and we've published what we thought was provable.

_____________________________________________

Professor Smartass
Re: Your defense of Arnold/Enron coverage
Date: March 21, 2005 5:12:16 PM PST

Enron was just one of the named defendants in the suit. I talked to Bustamante's office today, and they said the suits are still in play. It sounds like you aren't too familiar with them, so I'm attaching the original complaints.

Enron was just one of the named defendants in the suit. I talked to Bustamante's office today, and they said the suits are still in play. It sounds like you aren't too familiar with them, so I'm attaching the original complaints.

_____________________________________________

David.Lauter@latimes.com
RE: Your defense of Arnold/Enron coverage
Date: March 21, 2005 5:39:04 PM PST

Thanks. I am familiar with the suits.

arnold schwarzenegger ken lay enron cruz bustamante greg palast blackout blackmail recall president george w bush racketeering deregulation girly man girlie man terminator republican GOP conservative corruption professor smartass gray davis governor lies peak oil propaganda corporation fascism los angeles times david lauter nazi smartass comments resistance censored news rebel

Monday, March 21, 2005

Arguing with LA Times editor about Arnold/Enron story

March 21, 2005

David Lauter
Deputy Editor/Daily
Los Angeles Times
202 W. 1st St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Dear Mr. Lauter,

Thank you for your quick response.

Since you are a professional journalist, I would expect you would know more about this stuff than I would.

But I was unclear on a couple of things from your response. By saying that it is the attorney general’s prerogative to file lawsuits on behalf of the state, does that mean that there is no suit filed by Cruz Bustamante on behalf of utility customers, as covered by the LA Times on page A21, May 3, 2001? To your credit, you did cover that story, but it was buried on page A21, even though the blackouts were front page news for those of us affected by it. I was giving a college final when a blackout occurred and had to decide between canceling it or having my students huddle under one dim emergency light to finish their essays.

You said you covered this issue prominently, but a search of the archives for Schwarzenegger and Ken Lay or Kenneth Lay turned up a handful of incidental mentions in campaign notebook articles, usually when another candidate or protestor mentioned it, and to their credit, in the columns of Steve Lopez and Patt Morrison.

Further, your Jun 30, 2004 story on page C1 seems to confirm what Greg Palast of the BBC reported the summer before: that Arnold would support the weaker FERC settlement rather than the civil suit filed by Bustamante. The article could have connected the dots to explain why a governor so fixated on slashing our budget wouldn’t be interested in recouping as much as possibly of money stolen from us.

To the Times credit, you have covered Arnold’s push to further deregulate electricity, but again, this was buried in the California section of the paper even though the consequences, further rate hikes and blackouts, would be front page news to most Californians. A scan of recent Arnold front page stories includes his visit to the La Conchita landslide, his proposal for a low budget bridge in San Francisco, and his proposals regarding Indian gaming. Are these stories really more important than our governor trying to help the criminals who screwed us out of billions of dollars and who turned out our lights?

You are right that the meeting with Ken Lay by itself might not mean much, but Arnold got substantial aid from President Bush, not the least of which was advice from Karl Rove, staff loaned from Jeb Bush, and a visit from the President to Gray Davis to say he WOULD NOT intervene to cap electricity prices. At the time, Ken Lay was still the lifetime top donor to George W. Bush (he may still be). It’s not exactly a conspiracy theory to connect dots that big, and if the press was taking it’s watchdog function seriously, Arnold should have at least had to give a good explanation why all those things lined up in his favor without this being racketeering before the election.

You did this kind of work on Arnold’s sexual harassment problems. You didn’t just mention a case as it came up, but did the research to connect the dots. That’s all I’m asking. Connect the dots on the front page of the LA Times far enough before Arnold runs for re-election that information becomes part of the public debate.

Given that television news has become a embarrassment focused on celebrities and murder cases, and the free ride Arnold gets on right wing talk radio, where he is fawned over and unlikely to get a tough question, you have an even greater obligation to give the voters of California the news they need to make an informed decision because they aren’t getting it from any other local media.