McCamy Taylor

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Tue Jul-15-08 10:59 PM
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The Big Book of Enron: Domestic Spying, Election Theft and War Crimes

Edited on Tue Jul-15-08 11:10 PM by McCamy Taylor

I. Enron’s Cash/Gas Problem and Cheney’s Domestic Spying

We all know that one of the first things that Dick Cheney did when he got to Washington was order the nation’s phone companies----then AT&T, Qwest, SBC and Verizon---to start spying. We have been told since then that the administration is only interested in communications involving foreigners. Even if this is true, this cast a wide enough net to be beneficial to Enron. Ever since the mid 1990’s, Unocal in conjunction with Enron had been trying to negotiate a deal with Afghanistan to build a natural gas pipeline across the country. However, there were two complications. One, after the Taliban took over the country and extremists bombed two U.S. embassies, Clinton cut off all business contact with that country. Two, a rival oil company, Bridas of Argentina was already well established in Afghanistan and was trying to negotiate its own deal for the same pipeline.

The story about how the Bush administration spent the summer of 2001 cozying up to the same people who would eventually bomb the WTC is well known. The fact that the plans for the invasion of Afghanistan were drawn up before 9/11 is also common knowledge. After all, the U.S. had promised the Taliban a “carpet of gold” if they gave Enron the business it so desperately needed and a “carpet of bombs” if they did not.

Since there is another thread at DU right now which suggests that the Bush administration was making friendly with the Taliban because they did not grow the evil poppy, I think I need to refresh people's memories about the real reason all that cash flowed into the hands of our enemy. Enron needed money It planned to make money by building a gas pipeline across Afghanistan. The U.S. under Bush and Cheney engaged in heavy duty ass kissing all summer in 2001, trying to convince the Taliban to let Unocol/Enron build that gas pipeline. Poppies had nothing to do with it. Consider that the cover story, designed to make the evangelicals happy.

http://forwardamerica.blogspot.com/2008/02/enron-scandal-part-5-twin-pipeline.html

Now consider the possibility that Dick Cheney began his telecommunications spying operation before 9/11---at least in part---in order to help his buddy Ken Lay keep up with the competition. Domestic spying as corporate spying. What better way to keep abreast of other companies, like Bridas, and any offers which they might be making or deals which they might cut in Afghanistan? If the Taliban showed a sudden interest in dealing with another company, then the U.S. would know that it was time to apply a different kind of pressure.

http://www.truthout.org/article/richard-w-behan-from-afghanistan-iraq-connecting-dots-with-oil

http://www.twf.org/News/Y2002/0215-911.html

The Taliban, after initially negotiating with Unocal, had begun showing a preference for Bridas Corporation of Argentina -- could this possibly be the reason why the Bush administration has let Argentina's financial crisis spiral out of control?

II. Karl Rove, the Cleaner

Karl Rove is a central figure in many ways. He introduced Ralph Reed to Ken Lay. Reed would help Lay to lobby to get the so called “Enron loophole” through Congress in later 2000. That is the one that current McCain economic adviser, Phil Gramm wrote. That bill plus his wife, Wendy’s years at Enron looking the other way for a seven figure reimbursement and an administrative ruling that she made during the first Bush administration which made the Enron house of cards possible cost this couple their careers back in 2002. It should have bought them some jail time, too. However, Republicans managed to stay out of jail. We can thank Karl Rove for that, too.

Enron helped pay for the Florida mockery of justice. For its money, it got unlimited access to Dick Cheney. And when it got in trouble, it had a lot of friends in high places to help its friends in the highest places.

http://www.therestofus.org/factsheets/kenlay.html

Ken Lay's ability to put both Republican and Democratic friends into office caused a great deal of harm for Americans. Enron and its executives shelled out more than five million dollars in campaign funds from 1994-2001 to get people elected to office who shared its agenda. Enron and other energy companies would go on to cause blackouts and gouge consumers by faking the California energy crisis. Enron destroyed thousands of employee pensions and defrauded investors of tens of billions of dollars by cooking its books with more than 2,830 subsidiaries and offshore bank accounts. And our elected officials did nothing to stop them.
Our current political system works pretty well for guys like Ken Lay. But the rest of us get to sit in the dark while our electric bills skyrocket, our jobs are sent overseas, and our retirement funds are stolen away to offshore banks.

Karl Rove could not rely on the Supreme Court to save their butts from the fire this time. In the winter of 2001, there were three big threats. One was the Democratic U.S. Senate, which launched Enron hearings. While the Senators may have had mixed feelings about tackling the giant which had lavished wealth on them for so many years, they were more eager to uncover the crimes of the illegitimate president and his cabinet. Rove took care of that in the fall of 2002 when he used E-voting fraud made possible by Diebold (see Georgia’s election) and the distraction of Iraq to flip control of the Senate to the Republicans. All Congressional investigations of Enron came to a crashing halt.

Here is “Committee Staff Investigation of FERC's Oversight of Enron Corp.” at http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/111202fercmemo.pdf in which the Democratic Senate summarized their findings as they were about to relinquish control of the Senate to the Republicans for four years. Note footnote 146 on page 44 in which the report mentions that Enron appears to have taken its side of the case re: price gouging straight to the Bush administration via Dick Cheney, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Larry Lindsey and others in the spring of 2000---at a time when the Bush administration continued to ignore California’s pleas for relief from energy price gouging. The utility wholesalers scheme would not begin to unravel until a federal judge declared that it was obvious that the market was being manipulated.

The second problem was even worse. The federal criminal courts could be controlled, since they were under the jurisdiction of the Bush administration. Even though John Aschcroft had recused himself, there was no way that anyone was going to follow John Conyer’s recommendation and appoint a special prosecutor. The DOJ would carefully prosecute Enron executives and peons for charges that were not related to any administration officials (meaning no one was going to mention "California" in court). And if anyone with important information about administration wrongdoing----say Ken Lay or Jeff Skilling---were to offer to turn state’s evidence in exchange for leniency, they would discover that the state was in no mood to be lenient to businessmen who sold out their former partners in crime.

However, the DOJ had no control over the civil courts, and the state of California had a massive civil suit against Enron and other energy wholesalers. When the case reached its discovery stage, it could jeopardize Bush administration officials like former Army Secretary Thomas White, who had headed some of the criminal operations of Enron before coming to work for the government. The suit might even gain access to Cheney’s energy meetings. It had to be stopped.

Enter Arnold Schwarzenegger.
http://www.alternet.org/story/16902/

Arnold would prefer that you forget that the plan to recall Gray Davis originated with Ken Lay back in 2001. Originally conceived as a scheme to get rid of a pesky Democrat who would not play ball, the Governor Terminator strategy turned out to be the perfect way to kill the California civil suit before it entered the dangerous discovery phase.

Note that the DOJ has never tried anyone for the price gouging of California in which people were killed and injured. Even though there is hard evidence like this:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/enro-j15.shtml

On a widely distributed tape, one Enron employee says: “He just (expletive) California... He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.”
“Will you rephrase that?” asks a second employee.
“OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day,” replies the first.
“They’re (expletive) taking all the money back from you guys?” complains an Enron employee on the tapes. “All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?”
“Yeah, grandma Millie, man”
To which the Enron trader responds with utter contempt: “Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she’s the one who couldn’t figure out how to (expletive) vote on the butterfly ballot.”
“Yeah, now she wants her (expletive) money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her (expletive) for (expletive) $250 a megawatt hour.”

This is a big, flashy case, the kind of case that most federal prosecutors would love to sink their teeth into, since it could make a career. It is also the type of case that makes an administration look good with the little people, the voters, since it allows the feds to play the part of protector of the people. The only problem is that any effort to convict those involved in the price gouging of California would necessarily bring up the question "What did the FERC say while this was going on? What did the VP say? What did Bush say?" And they all said that no crime was being committed, even as they conspired with Ken Lay and other Enron representatives. The defendants might not win their court cases with this strategy, but just the threat would scare the administration away from prosecuting them.

There was one more danger, one that Karl Rove was particularly good at dealing with. Enron was great press. So, the White House had to attack those journalists who dared to suggest that administration officials were in any way connected to the Mother of all Scandals. Read this piece by Jason Leopold about the way that he was attacked by Salon, the New York Times and assorted other media outlets after he dared to gather evidence implicating obviously as guilty as sin former Army Secretary Thomas White.

http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold1009.html

It begins:

For nearly a year, I have been investigating Army Secretary Thomas White's role in Enron's demise, specifically, whether he was aware of the financial machinations that went on in the division he ran, Enron Energy Services, and if he took part in a scheme to make the unit look profitable when it wasn't.
I had already written several stories on what Thomas White knew for The Nation, Salon and Dow Jones Newswires, where I worked for two years as Los Angeles bureau chief. But in late July I hit the jackpot. During a conversation I had with an Enron source, I was told several emails were sent to White in 2000 and early 2001 by former executives of EES, warning him that EES was losing cash on many of the divisions energy contracts.

Here is another recent article by Leopold, one about how Dick Cheney ordered the FERC to cover up evidence of wholesale price fixing in the middle of the electricity crisis in the spring of 2001. That’s right. During the time when Cheney was laughing in Gov. Davis’s face and Bush was saying that California did not need price caps, it needed new generators.

http://www.truthout.org/article/jason-leopold-cheney-suppressed-evidence-california-energy-crisis

The problem with doing investigative reporting about the crimes of the rich and powerful is that the newspapers of the rich and powerful, like the New York Times and the Washington Post and even Salon (which relies on advertising) have no desire to do battle with people like Karl Rove. So, they throw the reporters to the sharks, in order to serve as a warning to others would dare to do the same and to discourage witnesses and sources from coming forward. This is why Dan Rather was taken down, too. To serve as a warning to uppity investigative journalists. His 80% plus respectability and recognizability rating made him an irresistible target. Think Roman Polanski’s cameo in Chinatown . People that stick their noses where they don’t belong, get their noses cut off.

III. The Curious Timing of the Iraq Invasion and the FERC Report on the California Price Gouging

I have already written about this in And Enron Begat Iraq: How War Saved Bush from Enron Accountability
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3555888

So here is a brief summary. The FERC had stalled in issuing its report on what went wrong in 2001, but it was clear that a whole bunch of energy wholesalers including Enron had conspired to jack up the price of electricity and before selling it to California. If you read the Senate’s report, it was also clear that the Bush administration helped. Even with a newly installed Republican Congress and a newly patriotic America, this could not be good for W.

Since the FERC report had been scheduled for release in the spring of 2003, the Bush team decided to do what they always do when there was bad news coming. They set up a diversion. A really big diversion. They invaded Iraq, something that they had always planned to do anyway. Never mind that they could not get the U.N. on their side. They invaded early and blamed it on the weather. They cooked up a story about yellow cake and mushroom clouds and said that they had to invade ASAP----as long as the invasion occurred in time to keep people distracted.

The FERC report made some headlines----in California. It was buried in the business sections of the newspapers in the rest of the country. Who cared if Enron and others had deliberately ripped off an entire state with the blessing of the Bush administration? Everything changed after 9/11, right?
The only problem was that in their mad rush to cook up their diversion, Bush and Cheney made more mistakes which lead to more crimes, like the outing of Valerie Plame. This in turn lead to the one and only Special Prosecutor investigation and prosecution of an administration official, Scooter Libby. Karl Rove had to steal a second election, or else they could all have been prosecuted for more criminal activity related to the illegal invasion of Iraq and the illegal way that the so called “war on terror” had been conducted----Cheney had turned it into an over the top extravaganza involving torture, illegal renditions, Constitutional abuses, war profiteering and obstruction of Congress . He did this, in part, to cover up exactly what occurred during those energy meetings with executives from Enron. So much has happened since spring of 2001 that many people forget that when Ken Lay met with Cheney to hand him a list of Things Enron Wanted (and got) there was no so called War on Terror. There was only greed .

IV. What Is the Statute of Limitations for Price Gouging California?

Bush will have no problem handing out pardons for torture, renditions and other war related activity when he leaves office. He will say that he is doing it to protect “patriots” and to keep America safe. However, he does not want to hand out any Enron pardons. That will not look good. It will make him look like a crook.

Right now, Bush, Cheney, Rove, White, the Gramms, Gonzales (Enron was his biggest donor when he ran for Texas Supreme Court) and the rest have a problem. The problem’s name is Jeff Skilling. He is supposed to be rotting in federal prison. However, Jeff Skilling knows things about some Very Important People that the Justice Department of a different president---say Barack Obama---might be interested in hearing. Certainly, he knows how much Thomas White knew and how much Wendy Gramm (I discuss the Enron related crimes of the Gramms in this journal http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x6490755 ) knew about what was going on at Enron. Those two former Enron employees could be in big trouble if he decided to talk. And, it is quite likely that other Republicans knew about Enron’s schemes and about its impending bankruptcy. For instance, when the Republican controlled House of Representatives used 9/11 as an excuse to pass a bill that would have given Enron a big infusion of federal cash as part of an “economic stimulus” package, the timing was very fortunate for Ken Lay.
When Jeff Skilling ditched Enron in the late summer of 2001, he almost certainly knew that it was on the verge of collapse, and he probably knew about criminal activity involving administration officials and people in Congress. As long as Republicans control the federal DOJ, they hold him hostage. But when Democrats take over the administration, he will be free to make a deal.
This possibility must scare the life out of some people. Like the Gramms. And Karl Rove. Dick Cheney. George Bush. No wonder they prefer to see John McCain take over. If Jeff Skilling slips on a bar of soap in the shower under McCain’s watch it won’t look nearly as suspicious. And once the statute of limitations on all the crimes is passed, he can talk as much as he wants and no one will listen.

For anyone who thinks that those involved in the cover up would balk at murder, recall Enron employee J. Clifford Baxter, who agreed to testify before Congress and then was found dead, two days after he talked about needing a bodyguard.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/enro-j28.shtml

Or Ken Lay, who conveniently died of a heart attack before sentencing.

The Big Book of Enron: Domestic Spying, Election Theft and War Crimes

Wake up America!:kick: