ENRON
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1.18 capt bak
rivkin?
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also koch
https://thinkprogress.org/how-koch-became-an-oil-speculation-powerhouse-706d135e412f/
jun 2011
In April, ThinkProgress caused a
when we uncovered a series :{of Koch Industries corporate documents revealing the company’s role as an oil speculator. Like many oil companies, Koch uses legitimate hedging products to create price stability. However, the documents reveal that Koch is also participating in the unregulated derivatives markets as a financial player, buying and selling speculative products that are increasingly contributing to the skyrocketing price of oil.
Excessive energy speculation today is at its highest levels ever, and even Goldman Sachs}: now admits that at least $27 of the price of crude oil is a result from reckless speculation rather than market fundamentals of supply and demand. Many experts interviewed by ThinkProgress argue that the figure is far higher, andout of control speculation has doubled the current price of crude oil.
Reached for information about its trading division, Koch Industries — America’s second largest private company — declined our request for comment
Writing on his political blog, an attorney working for Koch’s law firm angrily replied to our initial investigation by claiming that Koch is solely a bonafide hedger, meaning that it only participates in speculative markets to reduce risk for the oil the company refines (he also bizarrely argued that speculation has no relation to the price of oil).
The spin obscures reality: much of Koch’s oil trading business is actually akin to a hedge fund, buying and selling financial products based on oil with little interest in the actual delivery of the product. In fact, Koch pioneered the risky speculation industry that dominates the world’s oil markets today, first by inventing oil derivatives back in the ’80s, then by working to kill off regulations. ThinkProgress has delved into the history of Koch’s oil speculation business and the following timeline spells out Koch’s leading role:
— October 6, 1986: First oil derivative is introduced to Wall Street by traders at Koch. Koch Industries executive Lawrence Kitchen devised the “first ever oil-indexed price swap between Koch Industries and Chase Manhattan Bank.”At the time, such derivatives had been limited to currency markets, and the shift of creating a synthetic financial instrument based on the value of crude oil was revolutionary.For an agreed-upon period, an oil swap is a contract where one party makes payments based on a fixed oil price, and the other party makes payments back based on the changing spot price of oil. In July of 2009, EnergyRisk magazine, a publication for commodity traders, posted a piece exploring the very first oil derivatives and Koch’s role in developing them.
— 1990–1992: Koch, along with several oil companies and Wall Street speculators, form a coalition lobbying group to deregulate oil speculation. A coalition called “The Energy Group” is organized to press the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to allow oil derivatives to be traded off the NYMEX or any other regulated exchange. Participants in the coalition include Koch, Enron,Phibro (a powerful commodity speculator firm recently sold from Citigroup to Occidental Petroleum), J. Aron & Co (a commodity trading division of Goldman Sachs), BP, and other companies.
— January 21, 1993. Wendy Gramm makes first major move to deregulate oil speculation. “On the final day of the [George H.W.] Bush administration, January 21, 1993, [CFTC chairwoman] Wendy Gramm … approved the rule exempting key energy futures contracts from government regulation and returned a great chunk of the energy market to the grand old days of unregulated futures trading,” writes author Antonia Juhasz in the book Tyranny of Oil. The move mirrored the demands made by Koch’s lobbying coalition, The Energy Group. Gramm, the wife of then-Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), leaves the Commodity Futues Trading Commission and a month later joins the board of directors of Enron.
— 1997: Koch continues to shift from oil refining and pipelines to financial products. As Koch continues its embrace of selling exotic financial products, the company pioneers the first “weather derivatives,” essentially insurance policies sold to utility companies that bet on future temperature and weather patterns. Although Enron and Koch were the first to develop such financial products, hedge funds and investment banks like Goldman Sachs later expand the weather derivative business globally.
December 12, 2000: Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), after being lobbied by Koch and Enron, creates the infamous “Enron Loophole” vastly deregulating the oil speculation market. On the night of December 12, 2000, Gramm attaches a 262-page amendment to the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which is then attached to an omnibus spending bill that is signed into law by President Clinton before leaving office. The Gramm amendment, which receivedabsolutely no public scrutiny or committee hearings, radically expands and codifies the energy deregulation agenda began by Gramm’s wife during the first Bush administration.}:
The Gramm amendment allows so-called “over-the-counter” energy derivatives not only to be traded outside of regulated exchanges, but for private unregulated exchanges to deal in these sorts of financial products. Thus, massive “dark” oil speculation markets are born, including Enron’s platform for trading energy futures, and the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) — an online speculation exchange founded by BP, Shell, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other firms. Private e-mails reported by the New York Times reveal that members of The Energy Group, led by lobbyists at Enron but including at least two lobbyists from Koch and several more from Goldman Sachs and Sempra Trading, wrote Gramm’s amendment and pressured him to slip it into the bill.
— 2008: Rampant oil speculation spikes prices to unprecedented levels. As academics from the Peterson Institute, the James Baker Institute at Rice University, and others conclude, non-commercial speculators begin to dominate the market, forcing up prices. Although the evidence was abundant that speculators caused the massive price spikes during the summer of 2008, regulators were toothless to act. A bipartisan majority in the House overwhelmingly passed legislation to award powers to the CFTC to oversee rampant oil speculation, but Republican in the Senate — acting with help from Koch lobbyists — killed the bill, called the Energy Markets Emergency Act.
— 2009: Koch presentation to ICE boasts that Koch is on the level of transnational big banks and can now be considered one of the world’s top five oil speculators. The presentation, and our analysis, can be found here. Of course, Koch is not the only large corporation engaged in this practice. Large investors, like pension funds, hedge funds, investment banks, and others flocked to the commodities market after the financial crisis of 2008 and the collapse of mortgage-backed securities.
2010: Koch’s Tea Party front groups and lobbyists fight financial reforms designed to reign in the unregulated energy market.}: While Americans for Prosperity, as well as other Koch fronts, decry the Wall Street reform bill debated in Congress, Koch lobbied to water-down provisions of the bill related to derivatives. The sweeping Dodd-Frank reform bill contained broad new powers for the CFTC to crack down on excessive oil speculation, while also requiring that derivative are eventually traded on a regulated and open exchange.
— 2011: As oil speculation again hits record highs, leading to record high oil prices, Koch’s allies in Congress fight to undermine new reforms and allow unchecked speculation to spiral out of control. As ThinkProgress has reported, oil speculation is currently at a record level, which experts, and even many Republicans now agree, is causing pain at the pump.
After a furious lobbying campaign, the CFTC postpones Dodd-Frank mandated regulations on excessive oil speculation, known as position limits. As the CFTC grapples with how to implement these new rules, newly elected Republicans, many with Koch-backing, proposesteep cuts to the CFTC to undercut any rules on oil speculation.
Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries who is worth a reported $22 billion, likes to call his business an example of something he describes as the “Science of Liberty.” In reality, his company’s deregulation crusade has contributed to rolling blackouts, consolidation and monopolies in financial markets, and economy-wrecking oil price spikes. In comments to the CFTC, the reform-minded nonprofit Better Markets noted that, “the history of these markets is a history of anti-competitive, self-interested, predatory conduct that serves the interest of the exclusive few at the expense of the many and the system as a whole.”...
After working furiously to unleash oil speculators like Koch and Enron, the Gramm family was rewarded with plum jobs, including spots on corporate boards and placements at speculator-funded think tanks. Wendy Gramm still holds a position at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, although she hasn’t authored a paper in years.
While the Gramm family has faded somewhat from the public eye, their actions have radically changed the global economy. Since the Koch-Gramm-Enron deregulation bonanza, non-commercial oil speculators have flooded the market and increased the price volatility of oil in leaps and bounds, hurting consumers and businesses across the globe while making a small set of oil barons and financial giants very rich.
A McClatchy investigation found: “Prior to the 1990s, speculators made up about 30 percent of the futures market. In the latest reporting period, the ratio on May 3 stood at 68 percent speculators to 32 percent users of oil.” The following chart illustrates the dramatic changes in the oil speculation market following the Koch-prescribed deregulation campaign, and how non-commercial speculators have pushed the price of oil higher and higher:
Michael Greenberger, a former top staffer the CFTC, explained to me that a common misperception is that oil companies are only bonafide hedgers, meaning they only participate in the futures market to lock-in prices for delivery of their product. With the exception of ExxonMobil, which has explicitly stated that it does not engage in speculation, all the major oil companies (Shell, BP, Occidental, etc) operate like Wall Street investment banks and use their privileged position in the oil market to make speculative bets on the price of oil.
And as the unregulated oil market has grown, investment banks like JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley have become more like oil companies, buying tankers, pipelines, oil containers, and other physical assets to give them an edge while betting on oil. The Koch contango strategy detailed by ThinkProgress is not limited to Koch Industries either — Shell for instance is known for buying up cheap oil, storing it in tankers, and betting on future prices as they reserve the oil from the market.
Tyson Slocum, an expert on oil speculation at Public Citizen, has called Koch one of the worst actors when it comes to oil speculation. Koch, Slocum explained in an interview with ThinkProgress, is unique because of its status as a political powerhouse as well as a speculator with operations all over the world.
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/enron-by-the-numbers/
AP 2002
In a disclosure that outraged former employees, Enron Corp. reported that its 144 senior managers were paid $744 million in the year before the energy company's collapse, including more than $150 million for former chairman Kenneth Lay.
Enron outlined the compensation in a filing late Monday with federal bankruptcy court in New York - documents that provide a glimpse into the company's finances as it spiraled into the biggest bankruptcy in the nation's history.
The payments and stock given to the managers do not in themselves indicate any wrongdoing. Former employees could try to recover some of the money, but they would have to show that the company made illegal "preferential payments," or payments just before a bankruptcy filing that obstructed creditors from getting their fair share.
Nonetheless, representatives of former workers and shareholders responded angrily after the disclosure, accusing Enron's senior managers of essentially raiding the company's coffers while leaving their clients with a pittance.
"It's outrageous. My clients find it outrageous and it's just more evidence that people at the top knew that they better get while the getting was good," said Eli Gottesdiener, an attorney representing 24,000 participants in Enron retirement plans who lost as much as $1 billion as the company's stock slid.
Enron disclosed in the 1,436-page filing that top employees received $309.5 million in salary, bonuses, long-term incentives, loan advances and other payments. They also exercised stock options and received stock valued at $434.5 million.
Lay received $152.7 million in payments in stock - more than 11,000 times the maximum amount the company's laid-off workers will likely get in severance.
Lay, one of the many top executives who has been criticized and scrutinized since Enron's rapid collapse, received $81.5 million in loan advances, among other payments, and exercised $34.3 million in stock options.
Other executives who shared in the pay and awards were former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling and former chief financial officer Andrew Fastow, whose names have also been closely tied to the scandal. Skilling received about $35 million.
The more than 4,500 people who lost their jobs when Enron filed for bankruptcy have received a combined $43 million in severance and a tentative agreement has been reached whereby they would get an additional $30 million or so.
Individual employees would get no more than $13,500 in total severance, minus any payments they have already received, based on their salary and length of employment.
About a dozen lawsuits have been consolidated into a single class-action case asserting that Enron violated federal pension rules.
Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Dec. 2, four days after its proposed merger with crosstown rival Dynegy Inc. fell apart.
The bankruptcy filing followed revelations of questionable accounting that let Enron hide billions in debt through the use of off-the-books partnerships, some run by Enron executives.
By Brad Foss
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see great recession
from-enron-to-the-financial-crisis-with-alan-greenspan-in-between
us news world rept
Enron was only a prelude to the current market meltdown.In the wake of the Enron bankruptcy—which was briefly the biggest failure in U.S. history—two key lessons were obvious: Financial regulators needed lots more funding and personnel, and derivatives markets that were allowed to operate without proper regulatory oversight and reporting paved the way for financial engineers to privatize profits and socialize costs.Today, less than seven years after Ken Lay and his accomplices drove their once solid company into the ground, the United States is facing a financial disaster that makes Enron look quaint.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings, America's fourth-largest investment bank, involves a whopping $613 billion in debt. When Enron failed, it claimed assets of just over $63 billion.The implosion of Lehman—along with the federal takeovers of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and insurance behemoth AIG—is symptomatic of the same lack of oversight that existed in December 2001 when Enron failed. And that lack of oversight can most easily be understood by looking at the budget of America's single most important financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees financial markets worth tens of trillions of dollars.
In 2001, the SEC's budget was $437.9 million. In March 2002, the General Accountability Office issued a report that said that the shortage of money and manpower at the SEC had forced the agency to "be selective in its enforcement activities and...lengthened the time required to complete certain enforcement investigations." So what has happened since then? Precious little. Yes, the agency has a substantially larger budget today than it did during the Enron era. For this year, its spending authority is $906 million. And for 2009, the agency's budget is projected to increase slightly, to $913 million.But here's the howler: The number of enforcement personnel, the people who go after the financial engineers, is expected to decline.
That's right. Despite the trillion-dollar meltdown now underway, the number of SEC enforcement personnel will decline from 1,209 this year to 1,177 in 2009. In all, the SEC expects to have 3,771 employees next year. For comparison, the Smithsonian Institution budget for 2009 includes funding for 4,324 employees.That's not meant as a slap at the Smithsonian. It houses a myriad of the nation's most treasured objects. But the SEC actually guards the nation's treasure. And yet, Congress treats it like a bastard stepchild. Indeed, Congress doles out more than five times as much money for corn subsidies ($4.9 billion in 2006, the most recent year for which data are available) as it does for the SEC.
Those pitiful numbers lead us to the innumerable problems posed by derivatives, the same financial instruments that led to the chaos at Enron, which before it failed operated a huge—and almost completely unregulated—derivatives exchange business. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the global derivatives market is now worth some $676.5 trillion. That's $676,500,000,000,000. That's a fivefold increase over the value of derivatives that were traded in 2003. Further, that $676.5 trillion is 51 times America's current gross domestic product.In 2002, the world's smartest investor (and my pick for president this year), Omaha billionaire Warren Buffett, issued his annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. In it, he called derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal."
Few people heeded Buffett's warning. In fact, some of America's most important financial players dismissed him out of hand. In September 2002, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt, and James Newsome, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, sent a letter to a pair of U.S. senators in which they declared that financial derivatives were not a danger. Instead, they said that derivatives "have been a major contributor to our economy's ability to respond to the stresses and challenges of the last two years."
Further, they declared that a then pending Senate proposal to regulate derivatives could increase "the vulnerability of our economy to potential future stresses."In June 2003, Greenspan again defended derivatives. In another letter to members of the Senate, Greenspan—this time bolstered by Treasury Secretary John Snow and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson as well as Newsome—declared:
Businesses, financial institutions, and investors throughout the economy rely upon derivatives to protect themselves from market volatility triggered by unexpected economic events. This ability to manage risks makes the economy more resilient, and its importance cannot be underestimated. In our judgment, the ability of private counterparty surveillance to effectively regulate these markets can be undermined by inappropriate extensions of government regulation.
Back in 2002, in *Pipe Dreams*, my book on the Enron disaster, I wrote that reforms were needed to deal with derivatives. I quoted one financial analyst who called derivatives "Wall Street's dirty secret." I recommended that "derivatives dealers should be required to post agreed-upon amounts of capital to collateralize their trading positions" and that "the derivatives marketplace must be made more uniform, with policing by regulators who can establish price limits, listing requirements, and other trading parameters.
"I don't repeat that to brag about any foresight on my part. Many other people were arguing for the same types of reforms. The point is that the warning signs left by the Enron mess could not have been more clear. The derivatives mess created by Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the others occurred because of a regulatory vacuum where none of the players were required to post collateral to back up their positions or to disclose to investors the size of their huge derivatives positions. That lack of oversight has spawned a financial crisis that will reverberate through the global economy for years to come.
.Thousands of people are losing their homes. Thousands more are losing their jobs. Taxpayer money is being used to bail out private companies that were headed by corporate bosses who routinely helped themselves to multimillion-dollar pay packages. And all of it is happening because the Bush administration and Congress refused to heed the lessons of Enron.
Robert Bryces latest book is Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of "Energy Independence."*
Tags: Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, Wall Street, Enron, Alan Greenspan
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/01/enro-j14.html
Workers lose jobs, health care and savings at Enron
By Steve Paulsen
14 January 2002
Thousands of current and former Enron employees have lost their jobs, health care and life savings since the bankruptcy of the gas and trading giant last month, while records show that many of Enron’s top executives made in the tens and some in the hundreds of millions of dollars during the past year, while concealing the true financial state of the company.
In the largest corporate bankruptcy in history, Enron filed for bankruptcy protection December 2, only a few weeks after admitting that it had overstated earnings by more than $586 million since 1997 and competitor Dynegy backed out of a deal to buy part of the company for $10 billion.
The day after filing for bankruptcy, Enron fired 5,000 workers, one quarter of its 21,000 employees. The company expects to fire more workers as it sells or shuts down business units.
The layoffs at Enron’s showcase 50-story headquarters in downtown Houston were especially brutal, where 4,500 of the 7,500 workers there were let go. Houston police were brought into the building, and just before lunchtime all nonessential employees were told to go home. On their way out, many were told that they did not have jobs anymore. Others were called at home with the message that they had been fired.
Laid-off workers received a mere $4,500 severance payment, no matter how many years they had worked for the company. In the past, workers had received one week’s pay for each year of work and one week’s pay for each $10,000 a year in salary. Workers are not being told if they will receive any additional benefits or whether the company will enforce a contract provision that bars workers from collecting any severance pay if they sign up for unemployment benefits.
Enron also canceled all health and medical insurance for the 5,000 laid-off workers. Many workers had to cancel surgery, including at least one worker who was scheduled to undergo cancer treatment. Another worker reported that she only found out her insurance was canceled when she went to pick up medication for her husband who was recovering from heart surgery. She said that the antibiotics and blood pressure medicine now cost her $250 compared to the $10 co-payment she had previously paid.
Federal law requires that companies offer laid-off workers continued health-care coverage for 18 months. However, Enron has not provided workers with information on how to sign up for the continuing benefits. Even if or when the company makes continuing coverage available, most laid-off workers will be unable to afford the average premium of $7,000 a year.
Millions in 401(k) savings lost
Thousands of current, laid-off and retired workers lost most of their life savings when the company prevented workers from selling Enron stock held in 401(k) saving accounts just as the stock price plummeted.
“I can tell you, without pulling punches, something stinks here,” said Charles Prestwood, a 63-year-old retired plant operations worker who lost 99 percent of his savings when Enron collapsed. “I lost everything I had,” Prestwood said. He testified along with several current and retired workers in front of a Senate hearing held last month.
Millions of workers save money for retirement in company-sponsored 401(k) plans, which the company will match with a limited contribution, usually in the form of company stock. While the company gets a 100 percent tax write-off for their portion, they usually require workers to keep the money invested in company stock for a set number of years or until they reach a certain age.
Enron did both. Enron would not permit workers under 50 years of age, or with less than five years service, to sell the portion of the 401(k) that had been the company’s contribution. In addition, like most companies, Enron encouraged workers to invest their own money in the company’s stock. Consequently, more than half of employees’ 401(k) savings, or about $1.2 billion, was invested in Enron stock. Those shares are now nearly worthless.
Moreover, in the very critical period from the end of October through much of November Enron prevented all workers and retirees from selling any company shares held in their 401(k) accounts.
“It seems strange to me that as soon as the really bad news came out on Enron, we found ourselves unable to move out of the stock,” said 47-year-old Robert Vigil, an electrical machinist and foreman for Enron. Vigil said the losses for eight of his co-workers totaled nearly $2.9 million. “You can imagine how this catastrophe has affected us,” he said. “Now multiply that feeling across thousands of other homes.”
Enron claims that they notified participants in a letter dated October 4 that the lockdown would begin October 29 and last through November 20. However, Prestwood testified that his letter was dated October 8 and postmarked October 10.
Janice Farmer, a retired Enron worker from Florida, said she did not receive any notice of the lockdown. She said she became concerned over the stock’s slide and called October 22 to sell her stock but was told she had been locked out. Ms. Farmer was not able to sell her stock until November 26 and she received only $20,416 out of her $700,000 retirement savings. She now faces surviving on a $63 monthly Social Security check.
“I cannot help but feel that I and thousands of employees like me have been lied to and we have been cheated,” Farmer said. “Instead of being rewarded for my hard work and loyalty, I am left with a lawsuit against my employer and those responsible.”
The stock lockdown began the day after Enron’s release of a $618 million third-quarter loss that sent the stock into a tailspin. On October 10 Enron stock was selling for $35 a share, on October 26 it had fallen to $15 and by November 20 it had fallen to $7. By the end of November Enron stock was selling for under 50 cents a share.
Company officials said that the lockdown was necessary to maintain accurate records while the company switched to a new administrator of the plan. However, lawyers representing workers who lost their savings argue that a plan should not be touched, let alone shut down, during a period of financial trouble.
While workers and retirees were losing their savings, top executives and directors of the company—those who knew and were responsible for the concealment of losses and the dubious financial practices—were making millions in the sale of their stock.
Between January 1 and August 31, 2001, 20 top executives and directors sold 2,989,178 shares of Enron stock for a total of $116,977,511. At the top of the list was Lou L. Pai, chairman and CEO of Enron Xcelerator, who made $33,629,380. Next came Kenneth L. Lay, chairman and CEO, who made $16,103,181. Lay was followed by former president and CEO, Jeffrey K. Skilling, who made $15,554,700. Skilling abandoned Enron in August after holding the top job at the company for only six months.
Over the past four-year period, Enron’s top executives and directors took in nearly $600 million through the sale of company stock.
Under federal law, executives are only allowed to sell stocks during pre-announced specific times, typically inside windows between earnings reports. However, starting November 2000, many top executives began selling stock year-round on a regular basis according to a plan approved by securities regulators.
For example, Kenneth Lay sold 4,000 shares per day from November 1, 2000 until February 2001; 3,000 per day from February to April and 3,500 per day from May until August 21, the last day records were still available. Skilling sold 10,000 shares a week. The ability to sell shares continually this way was part of the deregulation of the securities industry.
In all, Lou Pai made $353.7 million from the sale of Enron stock while Lay sold $101.3 million worth of stock, or 24 percent of his stake in the company.
In addition, just days before filing for bankruptcy, Enron paid $55 million in retention bonuses to about 500 top executives. One quarter of that money went to just 11 people. Those 11 received payments ranging from $500,000 to $5 million. This was in addition to $50 million in bonuses paid earlier to 75 other executives.
Individual workers and retirees were not the only ones hurt by the Enron meltdown. While the executives made millions, retirement funds for millions of workers had also been invested heavily and lost millions in Enron stock.
In Texas, the Teachers Retirement system lost $35.7 million in Enron stock. The fund had bought $9 million worth of stock just three weeks before the company went bankrupt. The state’s Employees Retirement System lost $24 million and smaller retirement investment funds lost another $3.3 million.
In Florida, the pension fund for teachers, state employees, and county workers bought 7 million shares of Enron stock during the past 18 months. Officials for the fund that covers 650,000 workers and 150,000 retirees estimate they lost $306 million. The state of California’s retirement pension fund owned nearly 3 million shares of Enron stock.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/us/enron-s-collapse-workers-workers-feel-pain-layoffs-added-sting-betrayal.html
...This is not just hard times, not just one more company to shut its doors in a sagging economy and leave employees with unpaid mortgages and uncertain retirements. It is not even simple greed, not merely another boss who sacrificed people for profits, who moved a plant to Mexico to avoid paying minimum wage.
This, said some of the 4,000 laid-off workers of Enron, was a betrayal by executives who hid the corporation's crumbling finances and fattened their bank accounts while their employees' jobs and retirement funds -- built from Enron stock -- disappeared.
...
''They kept telling us, 'Don't sell, don't sell, it's going to go up.' And they issued more options,'' Ms. Stone said of the stock. She said that Kenneth L. Lay, Enron's chairman, once told employees, '' 'In a year or two, we'll be laughing at this.' [WHEN DID EXECS SELL THEIR STOCKS?]
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http://www.publicintegrity.org/2003/01/06/3161/enrons-deregulation-fight
Efforts to deregulate the nation's electricity market began with the 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, which allowed private investments in the power generation sector. But the enactment of PURPA, as it was known, was only a small beginning, as the Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 (PUHCA), which broke up the trusts that had owned utilities in the 1920s and gave companies local monopolies and a guaranteed, if small, profit in exchange for serving the entire community, continued to govern the electricity market.
After the deregulation of the air travel industry in the 1970s, independent power producers and consumer groups began calling for the repeal of PUHCA and overhaul of the nation’s power markets.
Enron joined that bandwagon at the beginning of the ’90s, and the company was in the forefront of the restructuring debate. The Houston-based energy powerhouse, which started as a gas marketing company, did not have any significant generation or transmission capacity when it began lobbying for deregulation. But it saw in deregulation an opportunity to expand its business and gain new markets by selling power—using the transmission grids owned by giant utilities—to industrial, residential and other customers.
In its push for deregulation, Enron was joined by other independent energy producers, consumer groups and some conservative free market advocacy organizations. But few lobbied as aggressively and vocally as Enron, which began campaigning on the issue in Washington in 1990, according to the company’s lobbying disclosure reports.
Enron sought a total repeal of PUHCA and modifications to PURPA. At a meeting of the Coalition of Northeastern Governors in Vermont in December 1996, Jeffrey Skilling, then-CEO of Enron Capital and Trade Resources, sounded almost impatient. “Every day we delay [deregulation], we’re costing consumers a lot of money,” he said. “It can be done quickly. The key is to get legislation done fast.”
However, the battle on Capitol Hill was not won definitively by Enron and its allies. Since passage of the Energy Policy Act of 1992, a number of bills have been introduced in the House and the Senate. But none of these measures became law, despite support from successive administrations. Both the Clinton and Bush White House backed restructuring and released their own versions of deregulation legislation.
The groups that lobbied against deregulation, mainly utilities, had been waging an even more brutal and successful lobbying campaign to block Enron’s preferred plans. Players on both sides of the issue have so far spent more than $50 million in lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Backers of deregulation were, however, more successful in states. Virtually every state considered deregulation at some point, and, so far, nearly half the states have restructured their power markets to varying degrees.
According the Department of Energy, 18 states and the District of Columbia have restructured their power market.
Enron won contracts worth several million dollars in many of these states.
Deregulation would have been more successful in states and even at the federal level had it not been for the California power crisis of 2000 and 2001. When electricity prices and public outrage shot up in California as a result of an artificial shortage, several states began revisiting the issue, and some either stalled or slowed down their deregulation plans.
Similar strategy
In the states, Enron tried to shape the debate on restructuring by following a strategy similar to the one it adopted at the federal level—that is, working with other large companies and trade groups, and hiring well-connected lobbyists.
Across the country, Enron coordinated its lobbying efforts and public campaigns with other groups. It worked with New York Energy Providers Association in New York, Alliance for Lower Electric Rates Today in Louisiana, Direct Access Alliance in California, the North Carolina Coalition for Customer Choice in Electricity, South Carolinians for Competitive Electricity and the Competitive Power Coalition in Massachusetts.
As in Washington, it hired a number of former legislators, regulators and other state officials to lobby state capitols. For instance, in Texas, it hired former state House Speaker Gib Lewis as a lobbyist. Sue Nord, a former Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, lobbied for Enron in that state, and so did Tom Rutherford, a former New Mexican state senator. Max Yzaguirre, head of Texas Public Utility Commission, once worked for Enron.
At the height of the deregulation debate, Enron had lobbying presence in nearly all the states. The Center database on lobbying interests in states, released early last year, revealed that in early 2000 Enron had registered to hire lobbyists in at least 37 states.
The company tried to gain access to legislators and other decision-makers in a variety of ways to ensure that the restructuring package was favorable to it. In August 1997, when the New Mexico legislature was debating deregulation, Enron took a dozen state legislators who were attending the Council of State Governments-West conference for a cruise around San Francisco Bay, theAlbuquerque Journal reported.
The same year, Enron Chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay wrote a letter to North Carolina House Speaker Harold Brubaker requesting a seat on a study panel for an Enron employee, who is connected to the Republican Party. “As you may know, I have been very active in Republican politics and served as Chairman of the Host Committee for the 1992 Republican National Convention held here in Houston,” Lay wrote. Despite the letter, Enron’s employee did not get a seat.
As states passed legislation to restructure their power markets, Enron capitalized by striking a series of power deals.For instance, in California, it won a five-year deal, worth $300 million, to supply electricity to the 31 campuses of the University of California.
The company also had stakes in cities that were privatizing electricity and also fought for privatization of power in military bases.
A 1988 law had banned the military from buying power from anyone other than local utilities. After a sustained lobbying campaign by Enron and other groups, the legislation was overturned. Subsequently, Enron won a contract worth $25 million to supply electricity to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, New York. The man who spearheaded the Enron’s lobbying campaign was Thomas L. White, who later became the Army secretary.
The cities and regions Enron targeted include Peterborough, in New Hampshire, Anaheim, Fresno and San Francisco.
In 1997, the company won a pilot program in Peterborough after waging an aggressive lobbying campaign that included holding picnics, lobbying town selectmen, and donating $25,000 for town improvements, according to the trade publication Electric Perspectives.
But Enron did not get everything it wanted from the states. Restructuring legislation passed by some states did not contain many of the provisions it had lobbied for, and some adopted plans that Enron’s opponents advocated.
More stories about
Enron, Enron scandal, Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Deregulation, California electricity crisis, Public Utility Holding Company Act, Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, Enron Capital, Houston
==
AUGUST 2, 2011, 8:56 PM
Out of the Ruins: Where Directors Landed
The career paths of the Enron directors provide anecdotal evidence that the former board members of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers will continue their prominent careers. Here is a look at former Enron, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers directors and their current occupations and public directorships.
Enron board members
Enron board members at the time of its bankruptcy.
Robert A. Belfer
Then: Chairman and chief executive of Belco Oil and Gas.
Now: Chairman of Belfer Management. Serves on the advisory boards of universities.
Norman P. Blake Jr.
Then: Chairman and chief executive of Comdisco. A director of Owens Corning.
Now: Retired. A director of Owens Corning and chairman of the audit committee.
Ronnie C. Chan
Then: Chairman of the Hang Lung Group. A director of Standard Chartered and Motorola.
Now: Chairman of the Hang Lung Group. Serves on the advisory boards of policy institutes and universities.
:{John H. Duncan
Then: Co-founder of }:Gulf and Western. Founder of Gulf Consolidated Services. A director at EOTT Energy and Group 1 Automotive.
Now: Retired.
Dr. Wendy L.Gramm
Then: Director of the regulatory studies program of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Also a director of IBP, State Farm Insurance and Invesco Funds
Now: Mercatus Center distinguished senior scholar at George Mason University.
Paulo Ferraz Pereira
Then: Executive vice president of Grupo Bozano.
Now: Unknown.
Robert K. Jaedicke
Then: Chairman of Enron board’s audit committee. Former dean of Stanford Business School. Also a director of the California Water ServiceCompany and Boise Cascade.
Now: Philip H. Knight professor and dean emeritus of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. A director of several private companies.
Then: Chairman and chief executive of Enron (reassuming the latter position after the resignation of Jeffrey K. Skilling).
Now: He died on July 5, 2006, about six weeks after being convicted of 10 charges including conspiracy and fraud but before his sentencing.
Charles A Lemaistre
Then: President emeritus at the University of Texas MD Andersen Cancer Center.
Now: Retired.
John Mendelsohn
Then: President of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. A director of ImClone Systems.
Now: President of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, although he is scheduled to step down on Sept. 1.
William C. Powers Jr.
Then: Dean of the University of Texas School of Law.
Now: President of the University of Texas at Austin.A director of the Forestar Real Estate Group and several academic organizations and other nonprofit organizations.
Frank Savage
Then: Chief executive of Savage Holdings, an investment company. A director of Lockheed Martin, Alliance Capital Management and Qualcomm.
Now: Chief executive of Savage Holdings. A director of Bloomberg L.P. and Lockheed Martin.
Raymond S. Troubh
Then: Financial consultant in New York City. Joined Enron’s board in late 2001, a week before the company filed for bankruptcy.
Now: Served as interim chairman of Enron from 2002 to 2004. Currently a director of Wendy’s International, Diamond Offshore Drilling, General American Investors and Gentiva Health Services.
Lord John Wakeham
Then: Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission in Britain and chancellor of Brunel University in London. Also a director of Michael Page International, NM Rothschild & Sons and the VT Group.
Now: Chancellor of Brunel University.
Dr. Herbert S. Winokur Jr.
Then: Chairman and chief executive of Capricorn Holdings, an investment firm. A director of the Natco Group and DynCorp.
Now: Chairman and chief executive of Capricorn Holdings. A director of various companies, including Mrs. Fields’ Famous Brands.
Other Enron board members in the years leading up to the company’s bankruptcy.
:{Joe H. Foy
Then: A former president of Houston Natural Gas and retired partner of Bracewell & Patterson, now known as}: Bracewell & Giuliani. A director of the Central and South West Corporation.
Now: Retired.
Ken L. Harrison
Then: Vice chairman of Enron. Chairman and chief executive of the Portland General Electric Company.
Now: Retired as chief executive of Portland General Electric in 2000.
:{Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche
Then: Chairman and chief executive of Azurix, a global water company formed by Enron.
Now: Named one of the “luckiest people in Houston” by Fortune, she left Enron in 2000 and sold over $80 million of stock. (Ms. Mark-Jusbasche reportedly paid $5.6 million into the shareholder litigation settlement.) She now operates }:cattle ranches in New Mexico and Colorado.
Jerome J. Meyer
Then: Chairman of Tektronix.
Now: Retired from the board of the Stancorp Financial Group in 2009.
Jeffrey K. Skilling
Then: Resigned as president and chief executive of Enron after six months in 2001, four months before Enron filed for bankruptcy.
Now: Sentenced to 24 years in prison and fined $45 million; case is on appeal and part of the charges against him were recently overturned by the United States Supreme Court.
John A. Urquhart
Then: Adviser to the chairman of Enron and a director of TECO Energy and a number of private companies.
Now: President of John A. Urquhart Associates.
Charls E. Walker
Then: Chairman of Walker & Walker, a government relations consulting firm.
Now: Retired.
Bear Stearns board members
Alan Schwartz
Then: President and Chief Executive.
Now: Executive chairman of Guggenheim Partners.
Alan Greenberg
Then: Chairman of the Bear Stearns executive committee. A director of Viacom.
Now: Vice chairman emeritus of JPMorgan Chase. A director of Viacom.
Then: Chairman of Bear Stearns. Resigned as chief executive in 2008.
Now: Retired
Henry S. Bienen
Then: President of Northwestern University.
Now: President emeritus ofNorthwestern University and professor at the Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. A director of Gleacher & Company.
Carl Glickman
Then: President of the Glickman Organization and a private investor. A trustee of the Lexington Corporate Properties Trust.
Now: President of the Glickman Organization and a private investor.
Michael Goldstein
Then: Former chief executive of Toys “R” Us. A director of 4Kids Entertainment, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Medco Health Solutions andPacific Sunwear of California.
Now: A director of Charming Shoppes, 4Kids Entertainment, Medco Health Solutions and Pacific Sunwear of California.
Donald J. Harrington
Then: President of St. John’s University.
Now: President of St. John’s University
Frank T. Nickell
Then: Chairman and chief executive of Kelso & Company.
Now: Chairman and chief executive of Kelso & Company.
Paul A. Novelly
Then: Chairman and chief executive of the Apex Oil Company. Chairman of FutureFuel. A director of Boss Holdings.
Now: Chairman and chief executive of the Apex Oil Company. Chairman of FutureFuel. A director of Boss Holdings.
Frederic V. Salerno
Then: Senior Adviser at New Mountain Capital. Former vice chairman and chief financial officer of Verizon Communications. A director ofPopular Inc., Viacom, Consolidated Edison, Akamai Technologies and IntercontinentalExchange.
Now: Senior Adviser at New Mountain Capital. A director of Popular Inc., Viacom, Akamai Technologies, IntercontinentalExchange, CBS and theNational Fuel Gas Company.
Vincent Tese
Then: Chairman of Wireless Cable International. A director of Bowne & Company, Cablevision Systems, the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation and IntercontinentalExchange.
Now: Chairman and executive managing director of Bond Street Holdings. A director of Cablevision Systems, IntercontinentalExchange and Madison Square Garden.
Wesley Williams
Then: Co-chief executive and co-chairman of the Lockhart Companies. A director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
Now: Co-chief executive and co-chairman of the Lockhart Companies.
Lehman Brothers board members
Michael L. Ainslie
Then: Private investor and former president and chief executive of Sotheby’s Holdings. A director of the St. Joe Company, Sotheby’s Holdings and Lehman Brothers Bank.
Now: Private investor. Resigned from the board of the St. Joe Company in February.
:{John F. Akers
Then: Private investor and retired chairman of I.B.M.. A director of the W.R. Grace & Company.
Now: Private investor and a director of }:W.R. Grace & Company.
Roger S. Berlind
Then: Theatrical producer and private investor.
Now: Theatrical producer and private investor.
Thomas H. Cruikshank
Then. Retired chairman and chief executive of Halliburton.
Now: Retired.
Marsha Johnson Evans
Then: Rear admiral of the United States Navy (retired). Former president and chief executive of the American Red Cross. A director, Huntsman,Office Depot and Weight Watchers International.
Now: A director of Office Depot and Weight Watchers International.
Richard S. Fuld Jr.
Then: Chairman and chief executive of Lehman Brothers.
Now: Established a boutique firm, Matrix Advisors, affiliated with Legend Securities
:{Sir Christopher Gent
Then: Nonexecutive chairman of GlaxoSmithKline. Senior adviser to Bain & Company. A director of Ferrari.
Now: Nonexecutive chairman of }:GlaxoSmithKline. Senior adviser to Bain & Company. A director of Ferrari and a member of KPMG’s chairman advisory group.
Jerry A. Grundhofer
Then: Chairman emeritus and retired chief executive of U.S. Bancorp. A director of Ecolab and the Midland Company.
Now: A director of Ecolab and the Midland Company, as well as a number of privately held banks. Appointed as a director of Citigroup in 2009 and left in June 2011.
Roland A. Hernandez
Then: Retired chairman and chief executive of the Telemundo Group. A director of MGM Mirage, the Ryland Group, Vail Resorts and Wal-Mart Stores.
Now: A director of MGM Mirage, the Ryland Group, Vail Resorts and Sony.
Henry Kaufman
Then: President of Henry Kaufman & Company.
Now: President of Henry Kaufman & Company.
John D. Macomber
Then: Principal of JDM Investment Group.
Now: Principal of JDM Investment Group.
Sources: Capital IQ, S.E.C. Edgar database, Westlaw, other public sources. sorkin dealbook
===
hmmn PPL's Daily
TPJ, a non-profit research group that has exposed the role of corporate campaign
contributions in buying influence in Texas politics, issued a report on Bush’s
gubernatorial elections, titled “The Bush Gusher.”
“President Bush’s explanation of his relationship with Enron is at best a half truth,”
McDonald told the World in a Jan. 14 telephone interview. “He was in bed with Enron
before he ever held a political office.”
He was referring to Bush’s claim that Enron chief Kenneth Lay had supported Democrat
Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. Records show that Lay gave
twice as much to Bush in that election as he gave to incumbent Richards.
Enron also pumped an estimated $2 million into the Bush-Cheney campaign. Bush
regularly flew from one campaign stop to another aboard Enron jets. Enron was so
determined to put Bush in the White House that they sent their top lawyer, former
Secretary of State James A. Baker III, to Florida to orchestrate the stealing of the 2000
presidential election.
:{:{“Baker was on the Enron payroll,” McDonald said. “}:When Bush senior lost his
reelection bid in 1992, Lay scooped up both Baker and Commerce Secretary Robert
Mosbacher as Enron ‘consultants.’}: Bush senior did a Gulf War victory tour of Kuwait in
1993. Baker, Mosbacher and former Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, a Gulf War commander, were
on the tour to sell Enron contracts to Kuwait.”
Baker arranged lucrative contracts for Enron to rebuild Kuwaiti power plants destroyed
during the war. Baker promoted Enron as a global energy corporation.
Together with Shell Oil, Bechtel and GE Capital, Enron won lucrative contracts to
construct natural gas pipelines and electric generating plants in more than 20 countries
including India, Indonesia, Turkey, Poland and Italy.
:{
Baker and Lay arranged for former Soviet chiefs Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard
Shevardnadze to receive the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service conferred by
}:the James A. Baker III Public Policy Institute at Rice University in Houston. It was part
of Enron’s efforts to secure concessions to develop oil and natural gas in Russia,:{
Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, a key element of the current war policy in Afghanistan,}:
where the Pentagon is already deploying permanent military bases.
“Lay needed politicians at every level to buy his plan for energy deregulation,”
McDonald added. Vice President Richard Cheney, himself the former CEO of Halliburton
Corporation, the Houston-based oil and gas equipment firm, was a longtime Lay crony.
Cheney set up his secretive Energy Policy Task Force to draw up a plan for energy
deregulation.
“The vice president might have been talking but it was Ken Lay’s words,” McDonald
said of the Cheney plan.
:{:{Lay was so powerful that he arranged for the firing of Curt Hebert, the pro-deregulation}:
chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Administration, replacing him with Lay’s
}:handpicked choice, Pat Wood. “Hebert was fired because he was not friendly enough to
Enron’s deregulation agenda,” McDonald told the World. “You don’t have enough
pages to cover all the conflicts of interest between Enron and the Bush administration.”
:{Other Bush appointees who had been on Enron’s payroll:{ include Secretary of the Army}:
Thomas E. White, vice chairman of Enron Energy Services; Bush’s chief economic
adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, paid $50,000 annually as an Enron consultant; and Bush
trade representative Robert Zoellick, who served on Enron’s advisory board. Karl Rove,
Bush’s chief of staff, owned a block of Enron stock once worth $250,000.}:
“There is a human tragedy to this bankruptcy,” McDonald said. “At least 5,000 of
Enron’s employees have lost their jobs and their Enron 401(k) retirement accounts have
vanished.” At the same time, 29 top Enron executives, including Lay, sold $1.1 billion in
Enron stock before it collapsed, raising the question of “insider trading,” a scandal that
could eclipse the Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken junk bond scandals of the 1980s.
“I think there was criminal activity involved here,” McDonald said. “Someone has to be
held accountable. The government must intervene to help the people who have been hit
by this debacle. Making people whole is not a bad idea.”
The ripple effect of the scandal is already spreading to other corporations. The New
York Times reported Jan. 15 that former President George Bush and Baker are also on the:{
payroll of the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based corporation headed by former
Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci.}:
The Carlyle Group owns United Defense Industries, which has secured a $20 billion
contract with the Army to supply the Crusader Advanced Field Artillery System.
Eyebrows have been raised about Carlyle Group because the family of Osama bin Laden,:{
the main suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, was a heavy investor in the company
until Sept. 11.}:
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) said, “Enron’s investors and employees and the American
people deserve an investigation that is thorough, far-reaching and free from any hint of
political favoritism.” He pointed out that Attorney General John Ashcroft was forced to:{
withdraw from the Enron probe. He received more than $57,000 from Enron in his
unsuccessful bid for reelection as Missouri Senator. The entire U.S. Attorney’s office in
Houston has also removed itself because it is so tainted by connections with Enron.}:
==
http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/features/conspiracyoffools/cast.html
Next Excerpt: "Blowing The Whistle"
...
It was all there.
In a single stroke, Kevin Kindall—an inconspicuous mid-level analyst relying on scraps of data—had exposed the financial rot eating away at Enron.
It had come to this: Enron, the supposed corporate success story of the last decade, had ignored—no, disdained—the basics of business, allowing them to slip away in its single-minded pursuit of profit. To executives richly rewarded for each newfangled deal, cash management was boring, not the cutting-edge stuff that let Enron be Enron. Closely tracking exposures was seen as an expense, not a moneymaker. The workaday business of business just didn’t have the kind of sizzle that won plaudits and praise. Buying insurance? A monkey could do that.
That was the culture that had flared in the high-money days of the 1990s and had since spread through Enron like wildfire. Now, with eerie precision, Kindall had predicted the scenario that would ravage the company in just seven short months. The disclosure of the Raptor losses. A market shock. A cascading collapse as Enron’s stock price blew through one trigger after another, pushing the company toward its ultimate demise.
It was as if an unknown engineer at the White Star Line had laid out the dangers of icebergs to the Titanic months before the great ship’s ill-fated voyage. There was still time. Changes could be made, disaster averted. The survival of Enron depended on the response of Ben Glisan, a man whose secret million-dollar profit from a partnership gave him plenty of reason to oppose letting anyone look too closely at Fastow’s dealings.
As Kindall wrapped up his presentation, Glisan skimmed the last two pages of the written report. The analyst was explaining how the recent Fortune magazine article had spelled out a series of dismal statistics for the company, which would be even worse if the “hidden Enron” in all of the off-books partnerships were included.
Glisan flipped the pages closed. “Well, I appreciate all the work that went into this,” he said. “But there really isn’t anything to worry about.”
Nothing to worry about? Kaminski bridled at the brush-off. Kindall’s analysis portrayed a company that could be on the precipice, and simply not have the data to be aware of it. This might be a matter of life and death.
...
===
strat ingor; Dick C said wd go to scotus on energy Task F secret, GAO caved; of 25 energy gop donor 18 admitted to Task F incl exelon ,peabody (900K in yrs to gop), enron (opposed grid upgrade b/c old one allowed manip) didn't want firstenergy to install digital switches big blackout 2003
===
Ritz, Dean Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy Apex 2006 (Enron gamed California) interview
chartered in Ore, can create another corp (as in most states); took $ from our pension funds
bankruptcy laws favor big banks, AG can influence
==
gangs of am:
THE REVOLT OF THE BOSSES 171
alec and Enron, for example, belonged to the following:
African Growth and Opportunity Act Coalition, Alliance for Capital
Access, Alliance for Lower Electric Rates Today (ALERT),
American Council for Capital Formation, American Institute for International
Steel, American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for
Affordable Electricity, Americans for Fair Taxation, Business Council
for Sustainable Energy, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Coalition for
Competitive Energy Markets, Coalition for Gas-Based Environmental
Solutions, Competitive Power Coalition, Direct Access Alliance, DOD
Competition Coalition, Electric Power Supply Association, Emissions
Marketing Association, Energy Group, International Climate Change
Partnership, Mid-Atlantic Power Supply Association, National Wetlands
Coalition, New York Energy Providers Association, Pew Center
on Global Climate Change, Power Trading Council, and Texas Renewable
Power Coalition.
... ch 19
CRIME WAVE
The roots of the scandals of 2002
It started quietly enough. On October 4, 2001, two executives of
Enron Corporation worked the phones from the company’s Houston
Headquarters, breaking the news to analysts for the nation’s major
credit-rating agencies that the company was expecting to report significant
losses for its third quarter. Later that week, the company’s board of
directors met and were also informed of thelosses, which were described
as significant$600 million. For most companies, a loss of that
magnitude would be a fatal stumble. But to Enron, it looked like little
more than a speed bump. Company executives explained the losses as a
one-time setback with no significant effect on the company’s future.
The directors later said that they left the meeting feeling that the company
was doing fine.
Enron, after all, was the epitome of success. For five years running,
the company had been named “most innovative” by Business
Week. Enron didn’t just dominate marketsit invented them.Around
the world, the United States pushed governments like Argentina, Mozambique,
the Philippines, and India to privatize key state enterprises
and sell those enterprises to Enron.When financing was needed, the
CRIME WAVE 211
U.S. government provided the loans. No company in American history
has ever been more closely connected at the highest levels of government.
At least 28 former U.S. officials worked for the company as employees,
officers, directors, consultants, or lobbyists. The Bush
administration counted five former Enron executives in its inner circles.
Over the course of his career, Bush himself had received more money
from Enron than from any other: $572,000, according to the Center for
Public Integrity. In preparing the administration’s energy policy, Vice
President Dick Cheney’s staff met six times with Enron representatives.
And upon the recommendation of Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, President
Bush chose Pat Wood as head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,
the main watchdog agency keeping tabs on Enron’s gas and
electricity businesses.Of course, Enron knew better than just to work
with one side of the political aisle: its ties to Democrats, though weaker
than those to Republicans, were nevertheless significant. Three-quarters
of the Senate had received contributions from the company’s PACs.
In hindsight, the announcement of Enron’s $600 million loss was
merely a preludea clearing of the throat. Not long after reporting the
loss, the whispering began in hallways and cubicles of Washington,
Houston, and Wall Street. Rumors swirled that the credit rating agencies
had found Enron’s accounting to be perplexing. Soon, the story
emerged that executives within the company had created secret partnerships
into which they had channeled hundreds of millions of dollars. It
was also rumored that Enron had created over 2,800 phony subsidiaries
in off-shore locations. Both rumors turned out to be true. Much larger
losses were in the offingperhaps even civil and criminal charges. Investors
hurried to unload their shares, the stock price tumbled, and
within weeks, $60 billion dollars of investor equity had disappeared into
the ether.
For employees of the company, what stung most were revelations
that :{29 company executives, while knowing the company was in danger
of collapse, had sold large amounts of their own stocksome $1.1 billion,
according to a shareholder lawsuit....}:
:{-----
}:
All three of the main Bretton Woods institutions have became integral
to the expansion of transnational corporations, especially in the
Third World. The international debt crisis of the early 1980s was a watershed
in the development of that role. During the previous decade, low
interest rates had encouraged a wave of borrowing from American and
European banks. Long-term external debt of low-income countries increased
from $21 billion to $110 billion between 1970 and 1980. In
1980, interest rates began to climb, and numerous countries found themselves
unable to meet their repayment schedules. The outcome of the
crisis was the creation of the “structural adjustment loan” by the IMF
and the World Bank, first developed with the Philippines in 1980 and
then with Mexico in 1982. Such loan packages provided emergency
funds for refinancing a country’s debt burdens, but not before securing
the government’s agreement on a number of conditions aimed at improving
its balance of payments. Among the austerity measures insisted
GLOBAL RULE 225
upon by the IMF were cuts in social services and privatization of stateowned
enterprises.
The requirement by structural adjustment programs that governments
sell state-owned businesses created a host of new opportunities
for transnational companies in public utilities, toll roads, bus systems,
oil pipelines, and power plants. An example is Enron, which generated
$23 billion in foreign revenues in 2001. Aided by World Bank privatization
pressure on Third World governments, Enron struck deals around
the world with numerous countries including India, the Dominican Republic,
Panama, Columbia, and Guatemala. In many cases,Enron also
received financing for such deals from the World Bank and from national
governments, including over $3 billion from the U. S. government.
---
ENRON: 12/7/2000 1st of 40x outages in 6 mos p 98 regs blamed: pres elect b2: if any environ regs preventing CA from getting 100% output at plants then we need to relax them. phil grmm (TX) blame " those who valued enviro exrtemism and interstate protectiomnism more than common sense " 98
enron lobbied to get out of Commodity Exchange Act [Wendy Gramm?] req report to Commod Futures trading Comission 99 week after b1 defeated, wendy gramm brought petition, passed 2 to 1 p 99 Phil big enron recipeint. corp book bakan
---
blog:
At the beginning of 2001 I created a web page covering the California electricity crisis. I started with a suspicion and a few hints of evidence, that the shortage was phony and being created to manipulate the market. Throughout the year the evidence mounted, and strange pronouncements and rulings came out of Washington that did more to obstruct solutions than to help. In June, whistleblowers verified that supply was being manipulated to raise prices. From then on the story turned increasingly from one of economic manipulation to one of political manipulation. The amount of crookedness involved was beyond all my expectations. By late November, as bombs were falling on Afghanistan, that page reached this conclusion:
"Let this be a lesson. The single most powerful faction in politics today is not liberalism or conservatism, but privilege and corruption. That's what elected George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton would never have been elected either without its approval.... Probably half of the federal budget gets spent according to its dictates."
Those words were truer than I knew, because the next thing that happened was the collapse of Enron, an event that soon uncovered a web of financial crime almost beyond belief in its enormity. And it became clear that the way that Enron had gotten away with so much could be summed up in one word: bribery.
The first purpose of this page was to publicize the whole ugly truth of that scandal, in greater depth than you might see in typical news stories, as it developed. I also continue to cover some residual stories from the California electricity crisis, such as PG&E's adventures in bankruptcy court, and the continuing efforts at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to protect many of the other pirates involved. And I watch out for new stories that involve corrupt links between government and the energy industry, and occasional other tidbits about possible corruption in the White House. Over time, quite a few different stories of political corruption have been covered here.
The story, as I observed it at the time, is divided into the following reports:
Ken Lay does the perp walk, finally. A Bush insider promises intervention in Iran if they win the election. California slowly reclaims a small amount of the money stolen during the electricity crisis, with no help from the federal government. PG&E comes out of bankruptcy with a deal that basically says they keep all their money and we pay all their debts. A macroeconomic analysis finds that the electricity ripoff may be responsible for the major portion of America's current recession: more than the tech stock collapse or 9/11 is. The Bush White House, starting to thrash desperately as it realizes it's now the underdog in the coming election, pressures Pakistan to come up with a terror suspect capture during the Democratic convention, and Pakistan complies. Then an administration spokesman blurts out the name of an undercover mole inside Al Qaeda, aborting major anti-terror operations... apparently just in an effort to prove that they weren't trying to make fresh terror alerts out of old data. Then they launch a smear campaign against John Kerry and try to deny their responsibility for it, which quickly leads to embarrassing connections being revealed. Encouraging action, but little real success, occurs on the touchscreen voting front. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela survives a recall drive. Florida makes a second attempt at using a bogus list of felons not allowed to vote: this one has tons of black voters and virtually no hispanic ones. Halliburton gets in so much trouble that the Army threatens not to pay them. And lots more.
After eight months out of action, E&F is back. The story of Halliburton's corrupt profiteering is coming to a head: it looks like they might have exaggerated a bit when they believed that "We can be as dumb and stupid as we want in the first year of a war, nobody's going to care." Now even the Pentagon is upset with them. As well they should be, since their abuses lead directly to greater hostility by Iraqi insurgents, and more violent deaths on both sides. Also, the long-simmering lawsuit brought against Dick Cheney's energy task force reaches the Supreme Court, with about the kind of results you'd expect from a justice who goes duck hunting with the defendant. Good old Enron is back in the news, having been caught on tape gloating about "fucking" California... just so this isn't an all-Cheney entry.
Schwarzenegger is elected, prompting much embarrassment for us Californians (me especially because of how I like to brag about my home state), and proposes a new electricity deregulation scheme that looks rather alarmingly too similar to the old one. Fortunately, it will never pass the legislature... at least not soon... or at least that's what some opponents are saying. I get a bright (?) idea for how to mobilize people effectively against undependable electronic voting machines, which might at some future time lead to me needing to stop writing Enron & Friends in order to concentrate on that other issue.
A long one. Developing countries flex their muscle in the WTO, fending off the self-interested policy proposals of the rich countries at a Cancun conference. The California recall electioncontinues to produce oddball developments, and things are not not looking too good for the challengers. Conservative Tom McClintock may end up elbowing aside Ahnuld as the principal GOP challenger, and not without good reason... but the candidate who's looking surprisingly strong right now is Governor Davis himself. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela fends off a recall of his own. We note Chávez's role in the revitalization of OPEC. FERC is still trying to protect some perpetrators of the California electricity crisis. Congress starts to roll back various items of Dubyan special-interest excess as the public's confidence in the White House fades. Some investigation into how the California electricity situation is shaping up today, with the crisis behind us... and a realization that the reason Ohio's power lines overloaded and caused a massive blackout was because deregulated electricity market-tradiing schemes have greatly increased the amount of long-distance shuffling of electrical power, creating demand on transmission lines that, from an engineering standpoint of simply getting power from generators directly to customers, is entirely unnecessary usage of the system. Our most frightening item is a look at the increasingly sleazy story of Diebold's electronic voting machines, which are now plagued with a whole list of embarrassments, and which may already have been used to rig a statewide election. My county uses those machines... and I'm voting absentee until they're removed.
Just two main topics covered this time around: the eastern blackout, and the California recall election. It's becoming increasingly clear that the blackout originated at FirstEnergy Corp. in Ohio, which turns out to be a snakepit of sleaze, with all the money that should have gone to maintaining equipment going to politicians, lobbyists, and "consultants" who, according to one legislator familiar with their ways of operation, pretty much got everything they wanted from governments the dealt with. Fine friends of Bush and Cheney, of course. And the recall story is linked to this: it turns out that one political figure Ken Lay met with in 2001, in an attempt to shore up Enron's faltering future as the electricity crisis began to come to a close, was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another list of summaries of miscellaneous other stories, much shorter this time.
It's the East Coast's turn for electricity trouble. We don't know enough yet to talk about causes. In California, things look ever more dismal for Governor Davis in the recall election, in part because (unless the State Supreme Court does something about it), Arnold Schwarzenegger could easily win even if far more voters vote to keep Davis, and would vote for another Democrat rather than Ahnuld. But something good has come out of the Schwarzenegger campaign: his is the first political campaign in the state that has dared to suggest that the old Proposition 13 property tax cuts need to be reversed. Meanwhile, suspicions about Halliburton's lucrative role in Iraq, and how they got it, are now more than just suspicions. This edition closes with a long bulleted list of briefly summarized corruption stories, as we have done several times before.
Enron & Friends returns after a long absence. Here we cover a random sampling of stories that went by during the break. That interval included such matters as a war with Iraq, but that's not our topic. We do, however, look at the apparent effort to obstruct investigation into 9/11, and efforts to protect Saudi interests that have gotten so embarrassing that even the Saudi government wants Bush to just put the facts before the public. The most up-to-date part is discussion of the California special election on whether to recall Governor Gray Davis, which is at least in part an outgrowth of the electricity crisis (in which Davis did far more good than those now attacking him did). Davis's Republican opponents seem to be unifying behind, God help us, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Bush is now pushing for another big tax cut; the centerpiece this time is a tax cut for stock dividend income. Maybe this is supposed to mollify the Wall Street investors who are very leery of a larger budget deficit. Independent economists, and even Bush's former Treasury Secretary, say the tax cut won't work as economic stimulus. Joe Lieberman announces he's running for president. It's revealed that, yes, the White House does inflate terror alerts. Henry Kissinger's replacement to head the 9/11 investigating commission is in a joint oil venture with Osama's brother in law. Some post-Enron reforms are making progress, all coming from non-elected officials. Michael Powell at the FCC gets cold feet about media monopolization. The Venezuelan coup group, failing to win by popular means, gets dirtier. Maryland's new governor purges environmental staffers. Background discussion on whether Clinton was really much different from Bush on serving corporate interests. Why to vote for third parties, especially if you currently don't vote.
Citigroup and the other Wall Street firms that helped Enron with its stock frauds are now paying the price in court: they just settled with federal regulators for fines totalling well over a billion dollars, only to lose a separate ruling that they can be held liable in Enron investor lawsuits. An embarrassing 1997 videotape shows both George Bushes listening to Enron executives joking about bogus accounting. Trent Lott's racist faux pas is apparently setting off a power struggle between factions inside the GOP, with the immediate result being more power centralized in the White House. North Korea pushes our nuclear buttons; Rumsfeld warns them we can fight a war against them and Iraq simultaneously. Iraq's 12,000 page report on the weapons of mass destruction it claims not to have apparently lists dozens of western corporations that have helped them create such weapons; many in Europe are saying this is why almost everyone, even the UN Security Council, is getting only a censored short version of the report. Another grab-bag of minor stories.
FERC is still protecting energy companies... but they may yet relent. Bush shakes up his economic team but not his policies, which are still a push for tax cuts that even Wall Street is increasingly leery of. Bush's new appointments, in this area and several others, do nothing to restore confidence. United Airlines fails to get corporate welfare, and this may well be part of what pushed Bush's old Treasury secretary out of office. In general, the GOP moves to centralize all decision making with a few leaders. A very large grab-bag of numerous other corruption stories.
The Texas oil companies Hunt and Halliburton are making a new deal with the White House to have taxpayers fund their gas pipeline project in Peru. Senator Domenici pushes more favors for domestic gas companies, including some under criminal investigation, with new revelations still appearing regularly. A Pentagon general tells Colombia that they'd better buy our planes if they want our aid. Bush is apparently giving in to reform pressure in a couple of areas, like the SEC and the Federal Election Commission. Spencer Abraham backs auto and oil industry plans for hydrogen fuel-cell cars. The EPA's "New Source Review" rule changes are a major concession to polluters.
The new Republican majority may still fail to pass many Bush agenda items, due to cold feet among some senators and representatives who actually think about the consequences. Even Bush is beginning to doubt that the FBI is handling domestic anti-terrorism competently. Anti-terrorism defense funds are neglected for the sake of Star Wars missile defense. Bush gets a UN resolution on Iraq and promptly starts to distort what the security council members voted for. Increasingly fumbling relations with Pakistan as a new government tries to form there. Janet Rehnquist at HHS becomes the latest Bushie to get in trouble for selling out to special interests. Legal pressure on generating companies that ripped off California increases; one (Williams) reaches a settlement with the state.
On this election day, Jeb Bush may win a second term thanks to vote- stealing tactics put in place two years ago, which the state of Florida already agreed needed to be corrected, but will not fix until after this vote. Harvey Pitt's days at the SEC may be numbered. Tommy Thompson at Health and Human Services continues to politicize scientific committees, this time packing a lead poisoning group with industry representatives. Some slow progress on legal penalties for Enron and Andersen.
Senator Paul Wellstone is killed in a plane crash, just after the launch of a massive out-of-state ad campaign against him. The effort to start a war against Iraq not only involves covering up the North Korean nuclear weapons effort for more than a year, it even involves setting up radical Islamists, probably sympathetic to Al Qaeda, as the forces we will back against Saddam Hussein. We promise Jordan half a billion a year to cover any Iraq war-related losses they suffer. Germany complains that we're no longer helping them track Al Qaeda, apparently just because of a petty snit over their opposition to an Iraq war. Bush pretends to rein in pharmaceutical industry legal abuses.
Congressional reform measures are lost in the frenzy over Iraq; we don't know if they will ever finish the corporate reform effort they began so enthusiastically. But at least Andrew Fastow has finally been arrested. A look back at the war against Mexico in 1846 as a parallel to current efforts to wage unprovoked wars. A brief listing of many corruption-themed news items over the several weeks since the last update.
Even the effort to start a war against Iraq is tainted by bribery, as the Bush administration starts handing out favors to foreign governments considering whether to back our call for war. Various favors flow in and out of Florida, involving multiple Bushes, former Enron subsidiaries and other Bush donor companies, and a considerable amount of taxpayers' money. However, some of the more reprehensible special interest measures now being considered by Congress are losing steam. We learn about some tax avoidance tricks that can only be used if you have at least $5,000,000, and about how "Leave No Child Behind" means leaving every method of teaching reading, except phonics, behind. The Federal Election Commission considers unilaterally brushing aside most real campaign funding limits, no matter what Congress thinks the law is.
...
We learn of the Bush administration's acquiescence to the coal industry lobby, prompting one internal resignation. The US Trustee assigned to the PG&E bankruptcy case is fired by Attorney General Ashcroft, apparently for being too pro-consumer. Halliburton is sued by its stockholders for the fraudulent profit reporting instituted by Dick Cheney. Dozens of companies have to restate their earnings; some are in legal trouble. Ross Perot, of all people, turns out to be one of the guilty parties in the scams that ripped off the state of California. Meanwhile, the GOP works to allow tax exempt churches more leeway for political activism, and the snowmobile lobby has no trouble getting Bush to stop a ban on snowmobiling in Yellowstone. Vladimir Putin praises Bush as the most effective lobbyist for American corporations. The EPA embarrasses Bush with a report saying that global warming is a real problem and we have a responsibility to do something about it. Long term projections show that talk of how that would hurt the economy is exaggerated.
The Corporate Responsibility Scandal is now the front burner issue in Washington. The media has lost much diffidence on the subject. MCI Worldcom goes belly-up, leaving a bad smell behind. Andersen is found guilty of destroying evidence. Bush floats trial balloons about possibly taking a firm stand against financial shenanigans and punishing cheaters, maybe. The White House tries hard to quiet down talk about Harken and Halliburton, the companies in which Bush and Cheney were guilty of the exact sorts of crookedness that everybody is now out to police. Meanwhile, the Federal Election Commission decides it doesn't feel like enforcing the McCain-Feingold bill, even though it's now law. And it turns out that the power generating companies in California are still holding down the electricity supply.
The first power alert since the crisis hits California. Dynegy, and other Enron competitors, are in increasing legal and financial trouble, and so are the banks that financed them. Phil Gramm, once Enron's favorite senator, is now fighting to block reform of the financial industry. Much grandstanding in Washington. The GOP still resists reform of offshore incorporation to avoid taxes, and pushes a bankruptcy reform bill that guts protections for the middle class but makes it easier for the rich to protect assets.
Enron's lawyers now claim that after the internal memos that detail the scams they were using to raise California electricity prices were written, they promptly stopped committing these frauds. But the worst of the artificial shortages came after that time. We learn how fellow crooked companies Enron and Global Crossing cooperated to hide debts and inflate earnings reports, via a round-trip deal with each other that both reported as a big profit. Joe Lieberman makes like he's fighting for consumers. A White House memo reveals instructions to downplay the California power crisis. Energy secretary Spencer Abraham still defends the lie that the crisis was caused by inadequate generators and transmission lines, though the same generators and lines worked fine in 1999, when demand was higher than it has been since. Bush announces the US will not participate in the 2005 follow-up to the Kyoto Conference on dealing with climate change.
Enron's internal papers reveal their knowledge of using fraudulent means to push electricity prices up. California officials appeal to the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, to help them get some money back. But Ashcroft's dealings with polluter Koch Industries show him to be someone who might let any corporation get away with anything.
In the White House they're passing out questionnaires to ask everybody what their Enron involvement has been. A subsidiary of Cheney's former company Halliburton gets a rather unusual (and lucrative) contract to provide services in Afghanistan that would normally be done by soldiers. A bit about Halliburton's unflattering history with the IRS. The US Senate investigates price fixing in the gasoline market. Three petrochemical companies lose a class-action suit over the gasoline additive MTBE. The ethanol that's supposed to replace MTBE is being produced in a polluting manner, but cleanup is promised. The mainstream media finally concludes that the electric power crisis in California was manufactured through fraud and bribery, which the liberal fringe press (and this website) reported a year earlier while the big news companies remained remarkably oblivious.
Enron's executives (like those at PG&E, and many other companies) responded to the bankruptcy by sharing big chunks of the remaining cash among themselves; the SEC tried to force them to justify the move, but failed to convince a judge to block it. We learn the tale of two California state senators who solicited money from Enron right in the middle of the legislature's investigation into the electricity crisis. More memos show the dealings of non-Enron energy industry lobbyists with the Cheney energy policy task force. Democrats say Republicans are watering down new bills that deal with financial industry conflicts of interest.
The exact techniques that Enron, and other power companies, used to manipulate the electricity market in California emerge. Many of them involve sending electricity on round trips out of state and back in, clogging transmission lines (either in reality or just on paper), wasting energy, and raising prices at both ends. Other tricks used at different times amount to "megawatt laundering", and even "selling the same electrons twice" in the early stages, according to state officials. Despite this, generators still deny responsibility for the spiral of high electricity prices. One of the chief implementors of these fraud techniques wasArmy secretary Thomas White. Meanwhile, coal power companies are fighting to exempt themselves from pollution laws. Cheney and Bush are cooperating with them.
A small White House scandal involving a Taiwanese slush fund emerges. Andersen loses business right and left and has to lay off employees; their CEO resigns. Energy secretary Spencer Abraham releases some subpoenaed documents, and large numbers of them turn out to have the significant information censored out. Even the uncensored portion shows the administration following the wishes of industrial lobbyists and ignoring environmental groups. Pressure increases on Army secretary Thomas White, formerly of Enron.
Phil Gramm, Enron's pet senator, still defends them, and the White House's relations with them. Senator McCain finally passes his campaign finance reform bill, putting Bush into an awkward bind. Senator Mitch McConnell, an ardent foe of reform, hires Kenneth Starr to argue against it in court. William Greider names democrats tainted by Enron, most prominently Joe Lieberman.
Andersen is indicted for shredding Enron papers. The other auditors are rumored to be no cleaner. California sues four power generating companies. Congress defeats the auto mileage bill, with the auto industry handing out rather modest campaign contributions to those voting against it. Some observations about the passivity and ineffectiveness of today's news media, who do far less real reporting than they used to.
Two judges order Dick Cheney and six federal agencies to hand over Enron-related documents. Compliance is slow. Wall Street analysts come under fire for hyping Enron stock even after it was clearly going bad. Rumors about Enron's sleazy internal culture. A list of well-known journalists who took Enron money.
The Senate debates the Bush energy plan. Bush stands in front of hybrid cars to promote the plan's alleged ecological value, though it's the same policy Dick Cheney got from Enron last year, full of rewards to the energy industry, including outright corporate welfare. The auto industry fights a move to require higher mileage from SUVs. California struggles with FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) over possible refunds for electricity ripoffs. Bill Moyers looks into Enron's machinations to manipulate FERC, including installing its current head. Texas Republicans sue over enronownsthegop.com. The Center for Public Integrity concludes that corporate tax cheaters costs the average taxpayer $1600 per year.
Kenneth Lay takes the fifth, like most of his cohorts. Congress wrestles with the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, always defeated in the past -- this time, the effort has broad support. Rumors that Dick Cheney will resign. Bush announces a plan to deal with global warming: entirely voluntary, with complete exemptions for power plants, and its most optimistic target is modest relative to the Kyoto Protocol.
Congressional investigations into Enron are under way, and executives start taking the fifth. Governor Jeb Bush denies contacts with Enron, and turns out to be lying. Investigative bodies start demanding Enron-related documents from the White House, and from the Department of Defense. Andersen attempts to clean up its act.
How almost all politicians, except Ralph Nader, enthusiastically supported the California utility deregulation measure at the time it was passed... though a similar measure in England had resulted in shortages and rising prices.
A "smoking gun" memo from Enron chairman Ken Lay to Dick Cheney's energy policy task force is revealed, showing whose instructions the task force was following. Many California officials tell how they were denied access to the group that Enron was granted, during the height of the electricity crisis. Enron paid journalists to influence coverage. And they hired Robert Reed of the Christian Coalition to mobilize the Christian right behind Enron's brand of utility deregulation.
Enron is sued by its employees, trying to recover some of the cash that its executives have hidden away overseas. The Bush administration, it turns out, blocked a Clinton-era move to dig into overseas bank accounts, shell corporations, and tax shelters, which are widely used by organized crime and terrorist groups. Dick Cheney refuses to let the public know how his energy policy task force arrived at its recommendations. Bush and his spokesmen attempt feeble lies to distance themselves from Enron and Ken Lay, but the deep entanglement between Enron and the Republican party is now clear. How Enron ripped off Dabhol, India -- they not only got $3,000,000,000 for a power plant that only ran for a few years, but paid local police to attack protesters in their homes. Uncertainty about whether the death of Enron executive Cliff Baxter was a suicide.
Enron's role in engineering the California "deregulation" debacle starts coming out. We learn that Enron had almost a thousand offshore shell corporations, and received huge refunds from the IRS while rarely paying any taxes. PG&E is in bankruptcy court, and trying to stick ratepayers with all of their debts while keeping their cash.
After the California electricity crisis has been brought under control, an unexpected consequence is that the giant electricity company Enron suddenly collapses into bankruptcy. It soon becomes apparent that their auditor, Andersen, collaborated in grossly dishonest reporting of the company's financial condition.
My original page on the California electricity crisis, from which this page is an outgrowth.
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Bush 2 #1 donor Palast, also Big Lies 500K$ (50K bush 1 library)
dude; 100b /r, 700K b2 93-, 100k 99-01, 280 k rnc
6 m pol $, 89-, 74% gop p 151
144 execs got 144 m after bakrupt, empl ost 1 b, public lost 1.5b
b2 invited kenny boy to help interview sr gov, incl energy dude 150
on chenet's energy task force oct 10/ 2001. IRAQ MAPS
best democ p 109 CA Reamin'
see also ch 6 CA needs nukes thus haliburton subsid Brown and Root
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal
timeline:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Enron_scandal
- Kenneth Lay: Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
- Jeffrey Skilling: President, Chief Operating Officer, and CEO (February-August 2001)
- Andrew Fastow: Chief Financial Officer
- Rick Causey: Chief Accounting Officer
California's deregulation and subsequent energy crisis
See also: California electricity crisis
In October 2000, Daniel Scotto, the top ranked utility analyst on Wall Street, suspended his ratings on all energy companies conducting business in California because of the possibility that the companies would not receive full and adequate compensation for the deferred energy accounts used as the cornerstone for the California Deregulation Plan enacted in the late 1990s. Five months later, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) was forced into bankruptcy. Senator Phil Gramm, the second largest recipient of campaign contributions from Enron, succeeded in legislating California's energy commodity trading deregulation. Despite warnings from prominent consumer groups which stated that this law would give energy traders too much influence over energy commodity prices, the legislation was passed in December 2000.
As Public Citizen reported, "Because of Enron’s new, unregulated power auction, the company’s 'Wholesale Services' revenues quadrupled—from $12 billion in the first quarter of 2000 to $48.4 billion in the first quarter of 2001."[^^11]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#cite_note-10)
Before passage of the deregulation law, there had been only one Stage 3 rolling blackout declared. Following passage, California had a total of 38 blackouts defined as Stage 3 rolling blackouts, until federal regulators intervened in June 2001. These blackouts occurred mainly as a result of a poorly designed market system that was manipulated by traders and marketers. Enron traders were revealed as intentionally encouraging the removal of power from the market during California's energy crisis by encouraging suppliers to shut down plants to perform unnecessary maintenance, as documented in recordings made at the time.[^^12]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#cite_note-11)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#cite_note-12)13]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#cite_note-12) These acts contributed to the need for rolling blackouts, which adversely affected many businesses dependent upon a reliable supply of electricity, and inconvenienced a large number of retail consumers. This scattered supply raised the price exponentially, and Enron traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of 20x its normal peak value.
- Wendy L. Gramm: Former Chairman of US Commodity Futures Trading Commission also on audit committee
http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-01-15/news/phil-gramm-s-enron-favor/1 phil gramm and wife
http://www.hereinreality.com/enron.html cheney
B2 called kenny boy conason lies p 149
RNC chair
Robert Zoellick
arnold?
axis of corp evil
http://www.hereinreality.com/news/axis.html global crossing
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met w. cheney in secret energy mtgs big L 152
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Gt Unravel
30b$ robbery 320
co's thought they bought protection, as shortages stated after 2000 and ended by 2002 demos got senate 321
2001 AES Wms paid back for shutdowns, but no penalty
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book p 65 mosbacher baker
http://books.google.com/books?id=yGqAPG0YC0YC&dq=mosbacher+enron&source=gbs_navlinks_s