"The Enron traders never seemed to step back and say, Wait, is what we are doing ethical?, Is it in our best long-term interests?, Does it help us if we totally rape California?, Does that advance our goals of nationwide deregulation?. Instead they sought out every loophole, inorder to profit from California's misery."
--Bethany McLean, Fortune Magazine reporter.
I remembered these questions while commenting yesterday on the role of oil in American foreign/military policy, when I said this:
Being raped by the energy mafia isn't just for foreigners. California suffers at the hands of Enron energy traders six years ago and didn't lose its virginity, but billions and billions of dollars which magically vanished when Enron claimed bankruptcy. The same people met with VP Dick Cheney in private to map out further incursions into disrupted energy markets.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
The response was swift.
I had used the words mafia, rape and virginity and some readers complained. It wasn't gratuitous, it was, I feel, warranted.
Let me explain: it was to clarify who the agents were, what the crime was, and who the victim was. It wasn't merely to express my anger at corporate predatory behavior.
(Bethany McLean's comments start at 5:47)
Aggressive military campaigns against foreign countries, and aggressive business practices that harmed society in California, shared the same root: Vice-President Dick Cheney and his band of energy executives.
That was the point I was trying to make. Lest we forget what the issue in California was:
LOS ANGELES (CBS.MW) -- Two days of rolling blackouts in June 2000 that marked the beginning of California's energy crisis were directly caused by manipulative energy trading, according to a dozen former traders for Enron and its rivals.
The blackouts left more than 100,000 businesses and residential customers in the dark for parts of two days, trapped people in elevators and shut down some offices of high-tech companies such as Cisco Systems and Apple Computer, as well as chipmaking plants, costing millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The traders said that Enron's former president, Jeff Skilling, pushed them to "trade aggressively" in California and to do whatever was necessary to take advantage of the state's wholesale market to boost the price of Enron's stock
http://www.marketwatch.com/...
I was not the first (nor the last) to paint the deregulation fiasco in such stark terms.
From the New York Press review of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Some low-level employees absorbed their bosses' pirate ethics. From Enron's 2001 bankruptcy filing until its 2003 demise—a vicious twilight in which Enron raped California's deregulated utility market, hobbled Gov. Gray Davis and masterminded Arnold Schwarzenegger's coup-by-recall—shirtsleeved Enron day traders were empowered to shut down plants for a hours at a time, inflaming demand and forcing the state to import Enron-supplied power at jacked-up prices. Gibney nails the company's trickle-down treachery with taped phone calls that catch traders chortling over California's despair. "There would be ample supply available at the right fucking price," one says, sounding like a Deadwood character. Another starts to describe a shady moneymaking opportunity as a theft, then settles on "arbitrage."
http://www.nypress.com/...
I hope this clears the air and allows us to examine the connections now between corporate scheming in California and how corporate scheming led to the disaster in Iraq today.