Enron & Ken Lay started ripping off California w/ in 72 hrs of bush's ....

.... taking office. Bet you that the liberal media will be all over this story and
it's result ..... Governor Arnold.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=507&row=0



"Fast-forward to January 2001. The George W. Bush administration, within 72 hours of his inauguration, issued an executive order lifting the Clinton Energy Department's effective ban on speculative trading in the California power market. The state was still in crisis, facing blackouts and 300 percent increases in power bills, the result of "deregulating" its electric system, as first suggested by Lay.

Instead of a "free" market, California's electricity bidding system became a fixed casino where Lay's operatives and a tight-knit cabal of corporate cronies jacked up prices through such tricks as "death star," "ricochet" and "kilowatt laundering."

In one instance, Enron "sold" the state 500 megawatts of electricity to go over a 15-megawatt line. Enron knew that sending that much power through those wires would have burned them to a crisp. To prevent this Enron-designed blackout, the state scrambled for other sources of electricity, which Enron and friends sold them at a big mark-up."

I wshi we kuld vote for Prez by phone as much as we wanna.

on it. (now that American Idol is over!)

..... he is a damn nice guy. :rofl:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=315x8271

Post #3 Steph w/ buddy.

The media will be right on this story .......... :grr:

Just like they were on Enron building bush's ranch and the help he gave * in Florida 2000 or
Ken Lay's help w/ Cheney's energy task force.

The one where they planned their coup on Davis and the CA taxpayers & citizens. BASTARDS!

She just turned five!

Aren't May babies adorable?

My three are summer babies (ugh!) in Florida. I was one sweaty mom-to-be.

:kick:

Gotta' protect Amerkur from them tearists.

making statements that the rest of the country would soon be in the same boat has CA and that an energy crisis was eminent. Glad they didn't get away with Enronizing the whole country.

We knew it was a farce and it's time that * and Ugly Ahnie were named in the plot as well!

the big institutional investors and outside Board members -- the ones who should have known better, and require them to give up their ill-gotten gains. Make them sell off their fifth or sixth vacation homes, if necessary, to pay into a restitution fund.

This sort of "seize the fruits of poisioned trees" approach to white collar crime would create a highly effective incentive for stockholder policing of corporate management.

I think I'll explore it more...I know plenty of other Californians who feel the same way.

thom hartmann was salivating over a plea deal for lay. after all, he is looking at life. he knows where ALL the bodies are buried. mmmmm. plea deal.

I'm sure the "liberal media" will be all over it.

link
http://www.enronmovie.com/

The truth is all the media did here in the Los Angeles area was to announce how terrible the rolling black-outs were and how to save on electricity. There was no actual looking into the problem, just reading the White House (Government) and corporate press releases. This amounted to no more than propaganda. The whole situation was a total joke.

out the role Dimson and Darth Vader played in Enron's agenda? :wtf:

There is NO excuse for not talking about this.

had a four person panel with Neil Cavuto as moderator and everyone agreed that CLINTON was the problem with ENRON.....I could not believe it...they showed graphs as well

What it told me was that the story IS very important to them (FOX et al) ...they NEED for this one to go away.

Only a blind idiot would believe this crap....

The latest buzz words: 'National Security' would've granted the Enron crooks a clean and easy 'Get outa jail free' card.

From your Palast's article:

Now in 2006 ...



And, we know they wouldn't lie about National Security would they?

the customers? It was disgusting and really said it all.

Amy Goodman in NYC June 13! Go to the front page of Palast's site http://www.gregpalast.com/
The link is in the upper right.

Thanks for posting this article by Palast. I read the AP's two-page article yesterday afternoon on the convictions of Lay and Skilling. The name "Bush" did not appear anywhere in the article. Unbelievable that they would totally ignore the relationship between Enron and Bush. During Clinton's presidency, if anyone Clinton had ever said hello to had gotten a parking ticket, the corporate media whores would never shut up about it.

He had gone on the air with an energy emergency speech, and TOLD us what was happening, He HAD to know what was going on, and who was doing it. By going public, FAST and in a big way, he might have scvared them off.....and there would be no Governator.. Gray went into "politico-mode" and gnashed his teeth in private, hoping it would go away..

California is one state where this approach might hadve worked.. We have (for now at least, and certainly back then) a democratic-controlled legislature who would have backed him up...but Gray had let himself be conned into "finishing" the privatization that Wilson steered us into ....Maybe Gray even "benefitted" from that privatization..who knows.. But his timidity only made it easier for them to stick it to us.

Perot DID know what was happening, who was doing it, and HOW it was being done.

Scandals made easy

<snip>

Confusing by design, Enron’s only function seemed to be to game markets and shuffle papers, so it’s easy to short-hand this scandal: greedy CEO-types tried to make money without actually creating anything other than stock-market hype and middle-man manipulations, paying off auditors and politicians in the process so nobody would stop them.

But if you’re looking for an unfolding scandal with real juice, there’s no beating how Californians paid Perot Systems to design our energy-trading program, only to have them turn around and teach companies like Reliant how to abuse the loopholes it created.

<snip>

Simple simplified: When Ross Perot ran for president in 1992, it was on the platform that every complex problem could be simplified and solved with good old countrified common sense. “It’s simple” was his favorite phrase. On television spots he’d use the phrase in combination with big charts, showing that he understood the many complexities, but could easily simplify it for y’all.

His company used a fairly similar approach in the PowerPoint presentation it used back in 1998 to teach energy companies how to manipulate the just-deregulated California energy markets, for which it had designed the trading programs under a state contract.

For example, “a relatively small PX participant could purposely congest a small interzonal path,” company officials wrote, identifying the Silverpeak line running to Nevada as one a generator could flood in order to be paid for reducing congestion.

<snip>

It was simple if you designed the system, and it’s simply illegal to misuse privileged information like this, something for which the Reform Party founder’s company should follow Enron into corporate ignominy. And the rest of us should learn this simple lesson: don’t trust markets, or the people who profit from those markets, to act in the public good.

http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=oid%3A12483

All the energy companies operating in California were in collusion; Duke, Reliant, El Paso Gas. Enron, Cal Pine

That would be sweet justice!

I still can't believe it. It's too good and the answer to too many prayers.

And their power mob stays intact. What an eyeopener. And I thought things couldn't get worse. And I thought this was a huge win. In fact, it's hardly a win at all. America is so full of corruption, even if the people were awake, they'd have their hands full.

Oh well. Thank you Greg Palast.

I'd like to post about this thread and link it from the California forum. :hi: This is a great post and I'd love it to be on our state forum so residents are sure to see it as well.

Let me know...

bliss_e.

:sarcasm:

Cause it is a pain to have to type all this stuff over again.

http://www.buzzflash.com/mailbag/05/12/mai05335.html

Dear BuzzFlash;

Please forward this to Maureen Farwell. She did an excellent job, but she completely forgot an important historical thread which is woven into the events she describes: Enron.

Enron is the very first crime committed by Bush administration officials and possibly the only one for which W. himself could be indicted in a court of law. With Rove as a presumed intermediary, W. rolled back Clinton's energy price caps early in his first term, allowing Enron to price gouge California. This was almost certainly pay back for the many favors performed by his biggest contributor, Ken Lay. Then, Bush's administration, including the FERC chief that Rove recommended, allowed the price gouging to continue, until a federal judge spotted it.

In addition, Ken Lay met with Cheney to help form his energy plan, Lay was involved in the negotiations with the Taliban over a gas pipeline which later broke down and led to US threats of violence against Afghanistan before 9-11 and Lay family members took part in questionable oil for food deals with Iraq.

As rumors were flying on Wall Street because of Skillings' defection, 9-11 happened. Almost immediately, a House Republican proposed legislation which would have given Enron a much needed infusion of cash in the form of an immediate rebate of taxes it had never paid, as part of a financial stimulus package for the economy. Despite what Dana Milbank later wrote in the Wa Post, administration officials really did lobby for this bill which passed the House easily but which got hung up in the Democratic Senate. When the bill failed to pass, Enron went bankrupt, and its house of cards collapsed. This led to the first big administration scandal--and to the first big Senate investigation of the White House.

The change from Democratic majority to Republican majority in the White House was essential if the Bush administration was to keep a lid on its own involvement in the crimes of Enron, especially the price gouging of California. In addition, Gov. Grey Davis had to be replaced by a Republican who would settle the civil suit with Enron. These things happened.

The other potentially embarrassing moment came in March 2003 when the FERC finally had to admit that Enron price gouged California and the Bush administration not only did nothing to stop it, Cheney and others laughed at California's pleas for help. I suggest that the invasion of Iraq one week before the FERC's report was no accident. This blockbuster announcement was greeted by California with "I told you so" headlines--and was completely ignored by the rest of the country.

Right now, with Congress in Republican hands,the only things that the administration has to fear are the secrets in Ken Lay's and Jeff Skillings' heads, and they can not talk because they are under very, very slow federal indictment in the Houston area. If some way can be found to get these two acquitted on a technicality or have their sentences overturned on appeal, then the Bush administration will have succeeded in covering up one of its first and potentially most damaging domestic crimes.

And, as Ms. Farrell's piece shows, Rove and Co. have done an excellent job of deflecting the nation's attention.

McCamy Taylor

My "liberal" local paper had fucking AMERICAN IDOL on the front page a few days ago.

I guess "no good news is no news".

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_oet&address=358x2912

Thank you so much!

Democracy Now
Enron Execs Found Guilty on Multiple Conspiracy, Fraud Charges
Friday, May 26th, 2006
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/26/1410242

We speak with investigative journalists Robert Bryce and Greg Palast.

<snip>

GREG PALAST:
...This is the Al Capone of electricity, Ken Lay. And like Al Capone, who got convicted of not filing his taxes -- after machine gunning people, right? --here Ken Lay, who is really the master financial criminal of the late 20th century, part of a crew, part of a mob, he's only sent up the river for very limited charges. Yes, it's a victory for the Bush Justice Department. He's basically convicted of not filing the proper papers, like not filing his taxes. So it's fraud charges, not filling out loan forms properly, not proper disclosures to the SEC.

Now, you have to understand what's happening here. That means, despite the fact that this one guy is getting nailed and stands -- two guys could go up the river, for up to a century in the case of Skilling, in fact, they're not charged with their big crimes. The Bush Justice Department went way out of its way to make sure that the big crimes were not busted. After all, these guys played games with not only the books of their company, but they took down the California power market, ripped off consumers with other power companies as co-conspirators, with investment banks as co-conspirators, $9 billion. $9 billion from the consumers of California. Not a single charge was excluded from the trial. So, all these guys are actually breaking out the champagne bottles, because what they did was is they hung out Ken Lay and Skilling to dry, but the mob stays there; just like when Capone went up the river, we saw the legacy of the mob. In this case, Skilling and Lay go up the river for these technical infractions, but the power mob still stays there.

<more>

Your moniker is (Tom) terrific! :toast:

To fix the links in your post, click edit and uncheck the Message Format button.

Good post!

Peace.

Here's the ad that Google pulled up atop Greg's Enron article:

Switch to TXU Energy
Take control of how and when you pay your home electric bill.
www.txu.com

And, here's what Palast has to say about what that company does to consumers in deregulated energy markets:

California's Independent System Operator put the cost to consumers of this "gaming" at $6.3 billion in a six-month period. Under the Roosevelt rules, when utilities were regulated to a fare-thee-well, the gaming rooms would have been busted.

Instead, the games have been institutionalized. For example, TXU, the corporate alias of Texas Utilities, has seen earnings per share rise 500 percent in five years. The reason: So-called deregulation allows the company to sell electricity at a price based on the sky-high cost of oil although much of its power is produced from cheaper coal or uranium. In effect, deregulation has become de-criminalization of price gouging.

Google ads are still far from intelligent. Amusingly, even outrageously, so.