The Ballad of Poor Kenneth Lay

January 4, 2001

Kudos to BuzzFlash for keeping the Enron financial scandal on the radar screen. I became an Enron shareholder by default when that corporation took over Portland General Electric and forcibly converted PGE shareholder's stock in 1998. Three years later, what had been a nice $20,000 college graduation gift from my late grandparents was soon emptied, leaving me and countless thousands of others holding the bag.

Because I'm young, I certainly have time to recoup that loss through my future earnings and investments. But my heart goes out to not only Enron's employees and retirees, but PGE's as well. They lost nearly everything, while the well-to-do at the top apparently did right well, according to the many articles I've read courtesy of BuzzFlash's links.

I was deeply touched--this being a family-friendly website, I won't say where--by a recent Los Angeles Times article that chronicled how poor ol' Ken Lay couldn't get any of his Washington friends to return his phone calls, because it seems that they are actually distancing themselves from any connections to Enron.

"No!" you say. "They wouldn't ... they couldn't ... how cruel!" But alas, apparently it's true--poor ol' Ken Lay is telling us that he has no more friends to play with.

Later that evening, while reading "Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat" to my 3-year-old nephew, I was suddenly inspired to write the following terribly cheesy poem about poor ol' Ken Lay, currently wallowing in self-pity and $200 million. And so, with apologies to the late Dr. Seuss:

THE BALLAD OF POOR KENNETH LAY
By Donald Koelper, Loyal BuzzFlash Reader and Fleeced PGE Shareholder

My friends in high places, both within and without,
Were nowhere to be seen when my firm bottomed out.
They skeedaddled in every direction. They ran
And said they don't know me. You-know-what hit the fan.

My board was caught with their hands in the till
And my CEO apparently fled to Brazil.
Now I, who once was the toast of this town,
Am left with a mess and the tears of a clown.

I called up my friend in the White House to say
"Hey, Dubya, this here's your old pal Kenneth Lay.
Now I've got a problem. Can we meet at your place?"
But the voice on the line said, "No hablo inglés,"

And hung up. I called back and said "Now, c'mon—
If it wasn't for me, George, don't you know where you'd gone?
That's right. You'd be nowhere, yet you now have the gall
To stand by and let your good friend take the fall

When it was you all along who—(Damn! That won't fly ...
The press corps would simply say, 'Don't blame that guy!
You know just as well as we do that he
Has all the IQ of a stump of a tree!')

Now, George, can't you see that the Feds have no case?"
But that voice once again said, "No hablo inglés,"
And hung up on me. Though my star once had risen,
Now there's nothing to keep me from going to prison.

Not the hundreds of millions of dollars I stashed
From all of those options I secretly cashed,
Although thousands of Enron's 401Ks
Left all my employees confused, in a daze

From calamitous financial losses they face
From their freefalling stock that was frozen in place
So they couldn't sell it. But with that one act
I kept this year's big Christmas bonus intact.

But that’s not the end of this woebegone tale
'Cause one thing is certain—I’m not going to jail
'Til my friends in high places confess and come clean
And are taken to task for their part in this scheme.