Kenneth Lay's Kerry Connection
washingtonpost.com
By Lloyd Grove
Friday, June 27, 2003; Page C03
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry regularly scorches the management of Enron, the scandal-ridden, bankrupt energy company founded by Kenneth Lay.
Some representative attacks:
• Feb. 16, 2002: "No worker in America should be robbed of years of labor by unconscionable personal greed. . . . One of my colleagues compared Enron executives to the Corleone family. Well, I think that's insulting to the Corleones."
• Feb. 9, 2003: "The president calls his energy plan 'balanced.' And I suppose it is, if balanced means what it did for the books at Enron and WorldCom."
• June 5: "It is time we had a president who is on the side of the many, not the few. . . . That means investing in people; it means restoring fiscal discipline, and it means that when an Enron bilks the retirement savings of ordinary investors and shatters consumer confidence, those greedy few at the top are going to go to jail."
Yesterday, self-styled muckraker Bernardo Issel of NonprofitWatch.org told us that the much-maligned Lay has been a longtime member of the board of trustees of the Heinz Center, an environmental group founded by the candidate's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. She's the group's vice chairman, and Lay left the small board earlier this year after serving for nearly a decade.
Issel calls this situation "hypocrisy." We'll settle for "irony."
The Kerry campaign directed us to Chris Black, communications director of the Heinz Family Philanthropies. Black acknowledged Lay's participation and his status as a corporate "boogeyman." But she added: "Whatever troubles he had at Enron, Ken Lay had a good reputation in the environmental community for being a businessman who was environmentally sensitive. When someone does wrong in one part of their life, it doesn't mean they can't do good in another part of their life."
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