Kenneth Lay Quotes
Well, rates would go up whether you deregulate or not, and of course, the rates that are going up right now on the electricity side are still within the regulated framework.
Lay, Kenneth. Interview. Frontline: Blackout, PBS, 21 June 2001.
California deregulated it’s electrical utilities who sold their generating capacity to others. As power consumption grew, there was not enough generating capacity in California and the state had to buy on the open market where they were gouged. The cost of electricity soared by 450 percent in the first year alone.
Theodore Roosevelt had made many changes to control corporate rapaciousness and disregard for the law. Taft, his handpicked successor, wanted to roll back some of the regulations feeling that the problem of corporate corruption and venality had been solved. TR did not agree and the men’s close friendship dissolved over this issue—so much so that Roosevelt ran against Taft in the 1912 election.
Criticizing federal regulators in the 1989 Savings and Loan scandal:
This quotation is particularly interesting in it shows how far partisanship and ideology can go into deluding political perception. Wallinson is a man of integrity who we must assumed believed what he said. Yet in the 30 years he referred to, most had Republican Presidents and there were a number of Republican controlled Congresses. During all that time the Republican Party platform called for continuous deregulation. Every Republican President and even Democrat William Clinton has bragged about their success at deregulating the business and financial environment in America. During that period, left wingers paraded to testify to Congress that the deregulation policies and practices was in their view injuring the country, While there was great debate over the desirability of deregulation, virtually no elected politician of the left or right denied that deregulation was happening. The Chamber of Commerce during that time always complained that the deregulation was not occurring fast enough and consumer groups claimed the rate was too fast. Yet Wallinson instead of taking the position of most conservatives that the deregulation had little or nothing to do with the Financial Crisis of 2008, actually convinced himself that there had been no deregulation. Human perception of political reality can be easily altered by ideology. Similar delusions have also occurred for left wingers. It is the ideology who is vulnerable regardless of what the ideology is.
Kenneth Lee Lay was the founder, CEO and chairman of Enron who was heavily involved in the eponymous accounting scandal that unraveled in 2001 into the largest bankruptcy ever to that date. Lay was indicted by a grand jury and was found guilty of 10 counts of securities fraud at trial. Lay died in July 2006 while vacationing in his house near Aspen, Colorado, three months before his scheduled sentencing. A preliminary autopsy reported Lay died of a myocardial infarction (heart attack) caused by coronary artery disease; his death resulted in a vacated judgment.
