It was a time when chaos reigned:
Hospital emergency rooms had to close in some areas and others had to switch to emergency generators. In Silicon Valley, firms like Apple and Hewlett Packard lost their power and in San Francisco, people were trapped in lifts, and businesses closed early …
The governor finally declared a State of Emergency.
This was January of 2001. Bush had just been “made” President, and his buddies were starting to terrorize the people of California into paying billions and billions of dollars into their pockets.
It was the biggest case of extortion and blackmail that I have ever seen, and I would challenge anyone else to find a bigger one.
Oh yeah — and people died because of it.
Two of the perps were just sentenced yesterday. What kind of justice did they receive? Why probation of course!
If anyone else had done this, it would have been labelled TERRORISM. But Republicans did it, so …. well, so what? A slap on the wrist and life goes on.
Granted, one of the main pirates behind this attack on our infrastructure is still awaiting sentencing:
The alleged mastermind behind the scheme, John Forney, is expected to be sentenced next month for his role in the scam that fraudulently sent California energy prices soaring, causing energy shortages and rolling blackouts.
Just to refresh people’s memories, especially of those who don’t live here, California was hit by rolling blackouts that went on for days. All across the state, power would suddenly disappear, leaving people stranded, causing car accidents as people sailed into intersections without traffic lights, causing at least one fatality that I remember, and causing general chaos everywhere.
Word on the street was that it was FOB’s doing it — “Friends of George Bush”. Of course they government denied everything — and lied to us all, saying that it was environmental concerns, mostly regulations about building new power plants — that were the cause. Of course this was a lie, but they got what they wanted — California buckled and gave them licenses for 38 new largely unneeded power plants.
For those who pooh-pooh conspiracy theories, this must be difficult to accept, for this entire mess was, and is, a conspiracy FACT:
The tapes provide new details of market manipulation during the California energy crisis that produced blackouts and billions of dollars of surcharges to homes and businesses on the West Coast in 2000 and 2001.
In one January 2001 telephone tape of an Enron trader the public utility identified as Bill Williams and a Las Vegas energy official identified only as Rich, an agreement was made to shut down a power plant providing energy to California. The shutdown was set for an afternoon of peak energy demand.
“This is going to be a word-of-mouth kind of thing,” Mr. Williams says on the tape. “We want you guys to get a little creative and come up with a reason to go down.” After agreeing to take the plant down, the Nevada official questioned the reason. “O.K., so we’re just coming down for some maintenance, like a forced outage type of thing?” Rich asks. “And that’s cool?”
“Hopefully,” Mr. Williams says, before both men laugh.
The next day, Jan. 17, 2001, as the plant was taken out of service, the State of California called a power emergency, and rolling blackouts hit up to a half-million consumers, according to daily logs of the western power grid.
Not only was it a bunch of renegade, criminal energy traders, laughing and [http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/06/MNGUT83SSC1.DTL chortling about cutting off power to “Grandma Millie” ……
Evidence of such manipulation was starkly illustrated in June, when audiotapes of conversations between Enron traders in Portland were released during a legal case in Washington state.
“If the line’s not congested, then I just look if I can congest it,” one trader said during an August 2000 phone call. “If you can congest it, that’s a moneymaker no matter what.”
In another taped call, in November 2000, two Enron traders chortled about fleecing “Grandma Millie” and “those poor grandmothers in California.”
What’s really disgusting is that the permission for these actions went all the way to the top of our federal Government, i.e. the brand new Bush Administration. One of the best articles I’ve ever seen on the malicious, conspirational intent of the Bush administration and Enron (and their friends) can be found in this article here by Robert Parry. It describes a trail of deceit, fraud, corruption and sheer piracy that spans the globe and involves the highest members of the Bush Administration. Hell, it’s clear at this point that Ken Lay was a de-facto MEMBER of the administration.
As Enron’s crisis worsened through the first nine months of Bush’s presidency, Lay secured Bush’s help in three key ways:
- Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity in California at a time when Enron was artificially driving up the price of electricity by manipulating supply. Bush’s resistance to price caps bought Enron extra time to gouge hundreds of millions of dollars from California’s consumers.
- Bush granted Lay broad influence over the development of the administration’s energy policies, including the choice of key regulators to oversee Enron’s businesses. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was replaced in 2001 after he began to delve into Enron’s complex derivative-financing schemes.
- Bush had his NSC staff organize that administration-wide task force to pressure India to accommodate Enron’s interests in selling the Dabhol generating plant for as much as $2.3 billion.
And check out just how far-reaching, and corrupt, the Bush administration’s collusion with Enron actually was:
For instance, the documentary evidence is now clear that in summer 2001 — at the same time Bush’s National Security Council was ignoring warnings about an impending al-Qaeda terrorist attack — NSC adviser Condoleezza Rice was personally overseeing a government-wide task force to pressure India to give Enron as much as $2.3 billion.
Then, even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when India’s cooperation in the “war on terror” was crucial, the Bush administration kept up its full-court press to get India to pay Enron for a white-elephant power plant that the company had built in Dabhol, India.
The pressure on India went up the chain of command to Vice President Dick Cheney, who personally pushed Enron’s case, and to Bush himself, who planned to lodge a complaint with India’s prime minister. Post-9/11, one senior U.S. bureaucrat warned India that failure to give in to Enron’s demands would put into doubt the future functioning of American agencies in India.
And California not only got screwed out of billions, but millions of investors, workers, and retirees, were screwed out of their retirement and their savings when Enron finally imploded.
But we got a new Governor out of the deal, right? Sure, it seems pretty clear that was part of the plan all along:
On May 24, 2001, future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan met with Enron CEO Ken Lay, at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, at a meeting convened for Enron to present its “Comprehensive Solution for California,” which called for an end to Federal and state investigations into Enron’s role in the California energy crisis[3] [4] [5].
In October 7th, 2003, Schwarzenegger was elected Governor of California to replace Governor Davis.
Let’s not forget just how close Bush and Ken Lay were:
Lay and his wife donated $10,000 to Bush’s Florida recount fund that helped pay for Republican lawyers and other expenses. Lay even let Bush operatives use Enron’s corporate jet to fly in reinforcements. After Bush secured his victory, another $300,000 poured in from Enron circles – including $100,000 from Lay and $100,000 from Skilling – for the Bush-Cheney Inaugural Fund.
They say that “9/11 changed everything”. Well it sure did, for Bush and Cheney in particular. Because this conspiracy, thier collusion in corporate fraud, should easily have led to their impeachment by now. But no, 9/11 happened and the world changed and suddenly Bush was all giddy about “hitting the trifecta” and claiming that “I’m a war President”. The sordid truth about his involvement in the biggest corporate scandal in history has been forgotten and is “old news”.
So for those who say “Bush hasn’t REALLY don’t anything he can be impeachd over” I submit to you the links above. Especially read the Alternet piece by Robert Parry. I can’t quote enough here to give you the full impact of his story. It’s damning as all hell, and this story alone should be enough to impeach the lot of these bastards.
I would like to hereby call for a special prosecutor to look into the connections of Bush and Cheney to the Enron scandal. We need a full, Fitzgerald-like investigation into this scandal, and we need it now.
We can never let pirates and thieves like these take over our government. We just can’t let it happen again. Which means we have to bring justice upon those who are already guilty.
Crossposted at DailyKos 2/15/2007
P.S. If anyone can find the details of the people who died because of this I would be eternally grateful. I distinctly remember one incident in particular where at least one person died in a car wreck caused by the sudden extinguishing of the traffic signals, but I can’t remember what town it occurred in or the names of the people involved. My googling skills are limited, or else it’s just darned difficult to find news stories from more than a few months ago.