So Ken Lay and Skilling are foun guilty, but what about all the other energy companies who were involved in faking blackouts 6 years ago? At that time forced California into long term high price contracts (as far as I know). I have paid and am paying for that right now and I want my money back.
Amy Goodman has an amazing Democracy Now segment about the whole thing. It is disgusting:
Excerpts from the transcript:
Enron employee asking a worker at a power plant in Las Vegas to take the plant offline. That same day energy supplies were so tight, Northern California experienced a stage three power emergency, and rolling blackouts hit as many as two million consumers
The same calls were made by Duke Power to San Diego Gas and Electric. We had a whole gang, Reliant, Dynergy, El Paso, Duke, Entergy. These guys were all working in coordination — Public Service of New Mexico — and they were playing games with the power market. They were running it like a fixed casino. And yet only one company went down and only two guys, and they weren’t even allowed to bring up the California power markets in the trial, so that basically, the Bush Justice Department did its very, very best to keep the real crimes and the whole mob out of the courtroom, because it would have brought it right back, of course, to the Bush administration itself.
Gray Davis had demanded that after Enron got and their buddies got caught nicking the state for $9 billion-plus, he did the obvious thing, he demanded that the money be returned.
Right after that, the recall drive starts against Gray Davis, who is demanding that the money be returned. Schwarzenegger becomes — the Terminator becomes the Governator, and literally within days, the Lay plan from the Peninsula Hotel goes right into effect, and Schwarzenegger just starts signing off with every one of these power companies to give dimes on the dollar, so that the public in California just never got its money back, just got virtually nothing.
So Lay appoints his own regulators, and he did this before in Texas, when George, when George Bush was Governor of Texas, when George Bush says he didn’t know Ken Lay, and I’ve got a letter in Armed Madhouse showing a note from Ken Lay saying, “Here’s the guy I want to be my regulator, the cop that’s supposed to be watching me,” and sure enough, Governor George Bush appoints Ken Lay’s personal cop.
No, that era is beginning. Okay, they got rid of the guy who kicked it off. They had to. He went too far. But the whole gang is still operating. That’s one of the big evils.
Yeah. I mean, basically the co-conspirators, the rest of the mob, was breaking out champagne yesterday, because they said, “We’re off the hook.” This should have been the beginning of new indictments, and like I say, the only new indictment are the guys that went after Enron, the law firm that sued Enron for its shenanigans. Milberg Weiss was put up. It was clearly political prosecution to say “We’re going to go after the guys who went after Enron,” and yet you heard the list. You had the law firm Vinson & Elkins, you had Arthur Andersen, you had a whole crew of characters who got off scot-free here.
And third — this is the big one — the law under Franklin Roosevelt said you cannot make political donations if you’re a big power company.
And in 2005, Bush made it official by repealing the F.D.R. Public Utility Holding Company Act, which barred these contributions by power companies to politicians.
Phil Graham was the one who carried legislation that allowed Enron to do a lot of the things it did and avoid federal oversight at the same time that his wife, Wendy, was on Enron’s board.
Well, what you have here is economic political gangsterism, which has now seized control of the government.
His great gift is really decriminalization of price gouging, of monopoly abuse, of economic abuse. These guys still have California by the light bulbs, and as deregulation disease is spreading across the nation, still 24 states have deregulated their power markets.
what we’ve done is we’ve decriminalized the rip-off of the consumer.
But if I can just add one other thing, this game isn’t over yet. There’s certain to be an appeal, and there’s a possibility of an overturn here, because of the judge’s jury instructions, which were fairly open-ended and were similar to the instructions given in the Arthur Andersen trial, which was then overturned at the Supreme Court, so while I’m pleased —
Of course the California Legislature that wrote these bad laws that enabled the price gouching is to blame too. Still, I can’t believe not more people are outraged and call for justice. Not that I had a high opinion of democracy here, but haven’t we been super manipulated into electing Arnold? Of course it wasn’t me, I can’t vote here.Bottom line is they ripped us off and they are not giving the money back, Enron is gone, but the mechanisms are still in place and ready to squeeze us again, and again, and again. Instead of going after the gang they indicted the law firm that went after Arthur Anderson and Co. See Greg Palast:
Furthermore, to protect our President’s boardroom buddies from any further discomforts, the Bush Justice Department, just days ago, indicted Milberg, Weiss, the law firm that nailed Enron’s finance industry partners-in-crime. The timing of the bust of this, the top corporation-battling law firm, smacks of political prosecution — and a signal to Big Business that it’s business as usual.
When do we wake up? Oh and this proofs that business is like fire. Controlled it keeps you warm and heats your food, uncontrolled it burns down your house.