Enron and Market Manipulation ...

[Gatekeeper]

Everyone:

... did any of you see the CBS report tonight on the tapes authorities have that show Enron employees and plant operators deliberately diverting power from California (among other things) in order to manipulate prices and create a national energy "crisis"?

Those dirty, rotten bastards. Talk about giving capitalism a bad name.

Gatekeeper

[Kidlicious]

umm... That's pretty old news.

[Japher]

It is for us in California at least (who have been paying attention), and part of the reason Davis got the boot... we've been crying foul since the 90s, and we're still getting reamed by the natural gas companies.

[Kidlicious]

Enron got theirs in the end anyway.

[gjramsey]

I saw the story. They had new audio tape of the energy traders gloating over the rolling black-outs. pretty amazing.

[Kidlicious]

I pretty much figured they were drooling over the profit they were making off of us.

[Commy]

And before you know it, Martha Stewart just might take over Enron...they'd work together nicely...

[Agathon]

Those dirty, rotten bastards. Talk about giving capitalism a bad name.

Yeah, getting caught really let the side down.

[Kidlicious]

My Marketing professor was reading off a list of recent corporate scandals. It was actually quite a list. You don't realize how many there are when they come out one at at time.

[Seeker]

...just waiting for Fez to get here and start defending Ken and Bush's other Enron pals as Great Americans...

[Dinner]

In California we've been crying foul since the very beginning of the Bush administration. The really scary part is Bush initially spoke up for Enron (since Key Lay and Enron were giving Bush millions of dollars) and its blatantly criminal actions plus Bush & his appointees refused to stop the obvious manipulations. The state of California had to sue the federal energy regulators to get any action and even then Enron kept pillaging in order to make billions. Reporters and lawyers have looked into the matter and there never was a shortage of electricity in California; instead Enron and three other companies which controlled the majority of the power plants agreed to shut down 1/3 of the generating capacity and sell play a shell game where they’d move the power out of state then back into state. Why would they do this? Because if energy came from out of state their was no limit to the price charged but if it came from within the state the price was regulated.

Basically, Enron and its pals created a false shortage to drive up prices then played a game to hide how they were illegally making billions.

[Agathon]

I don't understand you Oerdin, you complain about the lack of accountability and the rampant criminality, but you seem happy with a political and economic system that allows the clowns to get away with it. These people are wrist-slapped and then inevitably get back to their robbing ways.

[Agathon]

Ever wondered why these guys get such lenient sentences?

I mean the Enron guys commit billions of dollars worth of fraud and wipe out the savings of thousands of employees and investors, and they'll get a few years at a holiday camp.

On the other hand if some good ol' boy robs a filling station and gets away with a total haul of a couple hundred bucks and three cartons of cigarettes, he'll get years and years in the state ass-pounding penitentiary.

See something wrong here?

[Kidlicious]

They may start cracking down. People understand that their own ability to exploit within the law depends on everyone operating within the law. Sooner or latter, the public is going to start getting fed up.

[Agathon]

This is the Bush administration. "Shameless" is their middle name.