Da Do Run Enron, Da Do Enron

Tarun · December 16, 2001

* * * Enron Outrage

Free-market ideologues said the energy titan's triumphs proved

them right. Now they should admit its humiliating collapse proves

they were wrong.

Enron gave generously to House Majority Whip Tom Delay, R-Texas,

who thoughtfully introduced an electricity deregulation bill. The

company, of course, was largely responsible for the grooming of

George W. Bush as a national figure.

By Thomas Frank

Salon.com

Dec. 13, 2001

"I BELIEVE IN GOD AND I BELIEVE IN FREE MARKETS," Enron CEO Kenneth Lay told the San Diego Union-Tribune back in February. What's more, continued this titan of the energy business, Jesus himself was something of a '90s-style libertarian: "He wanted people to have the freedom to make choices."

Maybe, then, it was the Lord's work Enron was doing as it pushed electricity deregulation through the 1990s, and transformed itself from a gas pipeline company into an energy trader designed to provide choices and maximize profits in the freewheeling aftermath. After all, what better sign of the Almighty's favor could there be than Lay's compensation for the year of Our Deregulated Lord 2000: $141.6 million, a full 184 percent increase over 1999. Blessed indeed are the market makers! "We're on the side of angels," the company's former CEO Jeff Skilling told Business Week a little while ago. "In every business we've been in, we're the good guys."

Fortunately for the rest of us, though, Enron didn't inherit the earth. The company may have promised to deliver greater "transparency" to energy markets, but upon inspection its own affairs turned out to be a tangled mess of lies, political intrigue, nepotism and exaggeration that included the overstatement of profits by some $586 million -- a revelation that caused panic among investors and a catastrophic collapse for the mighty energy trader.

Nor will the obvious implications of the Enron affair be suppressed for long. Enron's failings were in fact directly related to its corporate ideology, to its zealous, cult-like love of free markets. According to Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, Enron fought fiercely and paid lavishly to limit or abolish federal oversight of its trading business; its trading business then collapsed for lack of oversight and accountability. It isn't a coincidence when those who run ads mocking government regulators and saluting themselves as colossal rule breakers turn out to be engaged in literal rule breaking and regulation circumvention. Why are we feigning surprise?

Enron was the peerless darling of all those who believed that free markets were the acme of existence. Its wreckage is as good a place as any to sit down and take stock of the deregulated, privatized state into which we've been so rudely hustled over the last decade. And here is what it looks like: Top management walking off with hundreds of millions of dollars while employees lose their jobs, investors lose millions and customers get to look forward to more rolling blackouts. Profiteering. Bought politicians. Stock market bubbles that inevitably burst. Workers thrown out on the streets.

Left to its own devices, this is what the free market does.

Yes, Enron hoodwinked the world financially. But ultimately the more remarkable aspect of this tawdry corporate tale is the way Enron tricked us politically, the way its leaders persuaded the world that their passion for free markets, particularly in the field of electricity, was somehow equivalent to "revolution," to "creativity," to human freedom itself. That only when the corporations were free to romp the worlds as gods would we truly have achieved popular democracy.

For management gurus, Enron was a particularly hallowed operation. Once a simple natural gas pipeline concern, Enron turned itself into an energy trader with awesome ambitions, buying and selling contracts to deliver power across the country. Who needed pipelines and power plants and other mundane physical assets in the age of the Internet? This was a "new economy," and in its last years Enron's starstruck fans took to describing it as a full-blown "market maker," a near-divine bringer of entrepreneurship and profit-taking to those slow-moving reaches of the economy where before there had only been regulation and an outmoded fixation on public service -- water, electricity, "bandwidth." And just look at those profits!

This is why recent years saw such precious expressions of Enronphilia as Gary Hamel's 2000 book, "Leading the Revolution," in which Enron is characterized as a "revolutionary" company, the home of "radical ideas" which "come from radical people," where "new voices have the chance to get heard," and where top brass say nice populist things like, "People are smarter than we are at the top."

Before Enron's troubles became a crisis, Hamel and his hero Lay were even scheduled to appear together at a high-profile November guru-fest called the "Revolutionaries' Ball." (The event's logo featured a red flag.)

Enron's own TV commercials exhorted viewers to ask the "confrontational" question, "Why?" -- a word that supposedly has the power to "bring years of conventional assumptions to a jarring halt." The company even equated its quest for free markets with the doings of folks like Gandhi, Lincoln, and the civil rights protesters of 1963 Birmingham.

(I guess Jesus wasn't available during their filming.)

In April 2000, Fortune magazine imagined Enron as Elvis Presley, the mythical bringer of hipness to the desert of 1950s culture. I still find it hard to believe this passage appeared in a responsible magazine of business, so I reproduce it here in full:

"Imagine a country-club dinner dance, with a bunch of old fogies and their wives shuffling around halfheartedly to the not-so-stirring sounds of Guy Lombardo and his All-Tuxedo Orchestra. Suddenly young Elvis comes crashing through the skylight, complete with gold-lamé suit, shiny guitar, and gyrating hips. Half the waltzers faint; most of the others get angry or pouty. And a very few decide they like what they hear, tap their feet ...start grabbing new partners, and suddenly are rocking to a very different tune. In the staid world of regulated utilities and energy companies, Enron Corp. is that gate-crashing Elvis."

The adulation persisted right up to the end. The cover of the September edition of Business 2.0 carried a photo of Jeff Skilling, then the company's CEO, giving the reader a big finger-over-lips "Shhhhhhh!" The secret Skilling wanted us to keep was not the devastating truth about Enron's profits, but that the "Revolution Lives." Yes, the dot-coms had tragically gone bust, but who cared about that? Enron's metamorphosis into a "virtually integrated company" offered "glimmers of a possible future." One trip to Enron's Houston headquarters and anyone could see that the "revolutionary" truths of the new economy still thrived.

By the time the issue hit newsstands, however, it was Skilling himself who had mysteriously disappeared from the CEO's office. Soon it was Enron's legacy, not dot-com hype, that was being dismissed as insignificant by the desperate new-economy faithful. Enron's scandal and collapse, it is now maintained, has absolutely nothing to do with the company's worship of markets and its efforts to discredit government oversight and its long-running campaign to push privatization and deregulation.

"No linkage!" screams the Wall Street Journal, piling on with no fewer than four editorials variously accusing Enron's detractors of "schadenfreude," declaring that Enron's collapse actually discredited the foes of deregulation, insisting that Enron-style deregulation did too benefit consumers (because free markets always do, nyah-nyah), and smugly declaiming the libertarian line on California's recent energy disaster: The state simply failed to deregulate enough.

Enron's P.R. magic was still having an effect even in such critical quarters as NPR's "Marketplace" program. One segment on the day of Enron's collapse featured bereft employees declaring their faith in the company's management ("These guys are brilliant people. They're really smart. They know what they're doing") while another flatly declared that Enron -- bless its soul -- had worked to keep prices low for consumers and that its demise might lead to a spike in energy costs.

And Fortune, which had fawningly compared the company to Elvis, currently features a cover story headlined "The Enron Disaster." Fortune now claims the problem was "the company's critics didn't throw enough rocks," and asks, "Given the extent to which financial chicanery appears to have taken place, is someone going to jail?" But hey, even Elvis screwed up in his later years.

Enron's business was, even in the best of times, difficult to understand. When writing a story about the company last June I could find no one able to explain precisely how Enron made what then seemed to be such impressive amounts of money. Clearly being a "market maker" entailed packaging a lot of innovative derivatives and contracts. It clearly also entailed considerable involvement in politics. As Business Week put it, "One of the biggest risks is that Enron simply can't create the open markets it needs." To do that it needed our help.

That's why P.R. was such a large part of Enron's mission. Not only did it sell itself as a defiant "revolutionary," but it sold deregulation as both a great step forward for human freedom as well as an inevitability, something we couldn't stop no matter what. Anyone who lives in a state where deregulation measures have been proposed knows what I'm talking about: The great tide of commercials and business-magazine stories and newspaper inserts all revolving around the predictable fake-revolutionary slogan, "Power to the People."

And what voters in those states wouldn't give Enron at the polls, the company achieved by other means, chief among them a massive -- and perfectly legal -- shower of boodle on influential political figures. The company and its executives routinely donated vast sums to both political parties, here and in Britain, thus helping the English-speaking world to achieve the free-market consensus that was, until recently, the pride of op-ed writers everywhere.

Enron CEO Kenneth Lay was a donor to the campaigns and a partner in the golf games of President Clinton, whose administration vigorously pushed Enron's various foreign initiatives. Enron gave generously to House Majority Whip Tom Delay, R-Texas, who thoughtfully introduced an electricity deregulation bill. The company, of course, was largely responsible for the grooming of George W. Bush as a national figure. As governor of Texas Bush used to fly around the country in Enron corporate jets. In later years Enron distinguished itself as the single largest corporate donor to Bush's campaign for the presidency.

THE CONNECTIONS DON'T STOP THERE: Lay is a business acquaintance of Vice President Dick Cheney and is co-chairman of Barbara Bush's Foundation for Family Literacy. Such was Enron's clout with the Bush administration that Lay, alone among electricity executives, was permitted to meet face to face with Cheney while the latter was cooking up the Bush administration's highly questionable energy plan. He also reportedly had a hand in choosing the personnel of the federal agency responsible for regulating his business. In Britain, where Enron profited nicely from the privatization of a regional water works, the company actually sponsored the 1998 annual meeting of the Labor Party.

An even more potent Enron weapon seems to have been to provide friendly legislators with cushy sinecures after their work on behalf of Enron had been done. The honor roll includes: Wendy Gramm, wife of Senator Phil, who secured for Enron a crucial exemption from regulation in 1993 when she was working for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and who then slid comfortably into a seat on Enron's board; Lord John Wakeham, the British Conservative politician who played a major role both in that country's disastrous electricity privatization and also in Enron's British water dealings, and who later received a seat on Enron's board; Frank Wisner, the U.S. ambassador to India during the first Clinton administration, who helped Enron win the $3 billion contract to build the infamous Dahbol power plant in that country in 1993, and who then applied the necessary pressure when India began to develop cold feet, and who found a nice, warm board seat waiting for him, too, upon his retirement from the Foreign Service.

Former Montana governor and brand-new Republican national chairman Marc Racicot has done a hitch carrying the sacred banner of deregulation for Enron. Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III has also logged time on the Enron payroll. Bush economist Lawrence Lindsay and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick enjoyed positions on Enron's advisory board before their official duties commenced. And the generosity is bipartisan (though Republicans have been courted more lavishly): Two of former Vice President Al Gore's close campaign buddies, Charles Bones and Johnny Hayes, have also swallowed Enron's golden pills. Recall that the Whitewater investigation focused on just a few hundred thousand dollars, and you begin to understand how devastating to the free-market crowd -- New Democrats and old Republicans alike -- any investigation of Enron's mega-million political dealings could turn out to be.

Those who are astonished that the name of Enron could even be uttered in the same sentence as "corruption" or "Whitewater" should know that the company has the peculiar distinction of being possibly the only corporation that is the subject of an Amnesty International report, which details the brutal treatment of protesting villagers near the Dabhol plant by Enron's hired goons. An equally poignant account of the madly corrupt Enron corporate style was provided by John Kachamila, the natural resources minister for Mozambique, who had the honor of receiving a bid from Enron for a planned natural gas project. Pressure from the U.S. government to accept Enron's bid soon followed.

Kachamila described the experience to the Houston Chronicle in 1995: "There were outright threats to withhold development funds if we didn't sign, and sign soon. Their diplomats, especially Mike McKinley [then the charge d'affaires of the U.S. Embassy] pressured me to sign a deal that was not good for Mozambique. He was not a neutral diplomat. It was as if he was working for Enron. We got calls from American senators threatening us with this and that if we didn't sign. Anthony Lake even called to tell us to sign. They put together a smear campaign against us, Enron was forever playing games with us and the embassy forever threatening to withdraw aid. Everyone was saying that we would not sign the deal because I wanted a percentage, when all I wanted was a better deal for the state."

This is the sort of thing that is being referred to when Enron eulogists fret that the company's "legacy" of deregulation is now at risk of being undone. And they are right to fret: Without the muscle behind it that the Enron billions provided, deregulation probably doesn't stand a chance. If practical business matters -- i.e., price and service -- are the only factors taken into account, most municipalities would quickly choose local ownership or control over the Enron way.

DURING THE CALIFORNIA DEREGULATION DISASTER, for example, prices for power shot up all across the state, except in the city of Los Angeles, which owns its own generating facilities. "Municipal utilities are more efficient on average and sell cheaper electricity and promote conservation," says political economist Gar Alperovitz. They "serve the public in all those ways better than the private utilities." When the priority is public service and not the survival of some well-connected middleman interested only in scoring sufficient profits to build its megalomaniac CEO a 50-room McMansion in suburban Houston, then public ownership fits the bill quite nicely.

But who cared about service when there was money to be made? A cardinal characteristic of the new-economy '90s was the subjection of such mundane stuff to the ideology of the market. Markets, we were told, are always better and more democratic -- by definition, in every industry, and in every age. And the American business press was only too happy to agree that what Enron was about was democracy and creativity, not corruption. Their readers have now learned that business school ideology makes a poor substitute for facts, and we have all learned the hollowness of deregulation's promise. In return for handing our electricity systems over to the market and to Enron, we were told, we would be paid back with enhanced service and an ever-swelling stock portfolio. The California deregulation disaster should have eliminated all doubts about the first of these promises; Enron's collapse has now put paid to the other.

Perhaps the real theological lesson to be learned from all this is the simple statement of relief uttered by a California Public Utilities commissioner when he learned of the great conglomerate's destruction: "There is a God."

Tarun · December 17, 2001

Enron Officials Snub Congress

By Marcy Gordon

WASHINGTON - 12.11.01 | Enron Corp., whose stunning collapse is being investigated by federal regulators and Congress, is declining to send any officials to a hearing Wednesday by two House panels. "I don't think they want to, or are not prepared to answer some very pointed questions about what went wrong," Rep. Michael Oxley, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said Tuesday in a telephone interview.

The hearing is being conducted by two subcommittees of the panel. Joseph Berardino, chief executive of Big Five accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP, which was Enron's longtime auditor, and Robert Herdman, chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, are appearing as requested by the lawmakers.

Asked whether the committee planned to issue a subpoena to Enron officials to compel an appearance, Oxley said that would not happen immediately. However, he added, "We can certainly contemplate that at a later date." Additional hearings are planned on the subject.

Wednesday's inquiry is designed to help Congress and the public "understand as best we can what structurally went wrong, what mistakes were made and what mistakes were not noticed," Oxley said.

Subjects to be examined include accounting practices by the company and Andersen, and potential securities law violations, and Enron's handling of its employees' 401(k) retirement investment plans, he noted.

At Enron's headquarters in Houston, spokeswoman Karen Denne said neither Chairman and Chief Executive Kenneth Lay, who was invited by the lawmakers, nor any other Enron representatives will testify Wednesday.

"We don't believe that we would be able to adequately serve the interests of the committee while at the same time we're trying to serve the interests of our creditors' shareholders, and former and current employees," Denne told Dow Jones Newswires.

The SEC is examining Enron's use of questionable partnerships that allowed the energy-trading company to keep half a billion dollars in debt off its books, and has issued subpoenas to Andersen related to its auditing of Enron's accounts. The company, which only months ago was the nation's seventh-biggest in revenue, has acknowledged that it overstated profits for four years.

Enron filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors on Dec. 2, following a six-week downward spiral, and also filed a $10 billion lawsuit against smaller rival Dynegy Inc. for scrapping a proposed buyout. It was one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in history.

The company laid off about 4,000 of the 7,500 employees at its headquarters the day after filing for bankruptcy with a promise that each would receive a $4,500 severance payment. At the same time, nearly 600 employees deemed critical to running its prized energy trading business received more than $100 million in bonuses last month.

Enron also is under investigation by the Justice Department and by the Labor Department for its handling of its employees' retirement benefit plans. Before filing its bankruptcy petition, Enron prohibited its workers for several weeks from selling stock held in voluntary retirement plans while the share price plunged.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving included information for research and educational purposes.)

mahak · December 17, 2001

No one cares, tarun, because there is no "cigar", no lurid sex scandal.

It is funny, when you think of it. Whitewater drove clinton to a little stress relief fun on the side from homely monica. The GOP made us think that whitewater was such a great amerikan ripoff. But whitewater was a legitimate real estate project that went bad, and everyone connected with it was run thru the gauntlet to the most extreme degree. The fact that whitewater was connected with the S&L scandal was overplayed like a bad four seasons record in the sense that whitewater losses was number 145 on the huge list, while Dubyas brother skated, yet was 4th on the same list.

Now we come to Enron, which never was a legitimate company, and was created only to gouge the public by buying energy companies with financing from the benLaden family and others from the house of Saud. There is nothing legitimate about such gouging, but where is the witchhunt? Im still waiting for the war to go to the real backers of this "terrorist" scam. BenLaden will not be caught, because the suckers stuck on rather-jennings-brokaw guruship need a hitler to give the ten minute hate to. Taliban was the enemy, not because they protected the Saud, but because they resisted the pipeline thru Affie to carry the Stan's (you name em, all the former southern russian states have oil to sell and need the pipe to Paki) slime to fuel our driving habits.

dont get me started, I was hopin "W" would be a little different from his dad, but this war is about oil, just like the fiasco against the former target of our ten-minute hate saddam.

Who knocked off WTC? Follow the money, not some phony religious zealot idealism. Has freedom been expanded by righteous indignation against the "attack on freedom"? Ya gotta ask, who took your freedom away?

I blame it all on those cowboy NY Firefighters who blocked the stairways and told the escapees to go back to their offices, they are the culprits.

Hell, where is Monica now that we need her. Clinton was much funner that all this end-of-the-world crap.

mad mahax

PS sorry for the tone, but read Daniel 11 and see if bush sr, clinton, and w aren't described to a tee.

Tarun · December 25, 2001

Mahak, you're right, no one cares till it affects them directly.

PrabhupAd said & any other sane man would say:

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

"A stitch in time saves 9."

= = = = = = = = = =

Why did Bush Administration want to blame Iraq for Anthrax letters?

Laying the blame on Iraq would justify a Military campaign against them. US would most likely use opposition groups within Iraq. The Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq would love to get rid of Sadham, same goes for the Kurds in in northern Iraq. This could bring Iran into the conflict along side their Shiite Muslim brothers.

Food for thought:

If we support an uprising of opposition groups in Iraq, Iran would jump up and down with glee. Iran is controlled by Shiite Muslims, the Iraqis living in the southern part of Iraq are also Shiites!. Remember the rumors coming out of the White House?? Iran will support the Bush military campaign against International terrorists?

"Corporate America has but one GOD and that is money," and Oil produces a lot of money!!

Speaking of Oil the bushys will go to any lengths to cover up the ENRON scandal.

Enron is Oil/ Power and The Bush family as well as members of Dubya's Cabinet have been part of ENRON for years. BUSH-ENRON one and the same.

The nickle/dime Whitewater thing and The Tea Pot Dome Scandal are small potatoes compared to Enron/Bush.

Here is the way I see it. Enron created the George W. Bush myth. They then participated in the theft of the 2000 Presidential election.

Enron a massive conglomerate is like a giant Octopus with tentacles reaching out to every aspect of our lives. For ENRON to survive it is essential they have access to an unlimited supply of OIL and Natural Gas. This is where The Bush Family and their friends come into the picture.

Bush Sr. sent over 500,000 American troops into the middle east for one reason, to protect the supply of oil coming out of Saudi Arabia and Kuwaiti..

Dubya attacked and defeated the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for one reason. Gain access to the Oil reserves in Russia. Bin Ladens attack on the world Trade Center provided him the excuse he needed to achieve that objective.

Why go after Iraq?? Iraq has lots of Oil and with Iran coming back into the fold is frosting on the cake. Why?? Oil my friends, Oil. Iran has a vast amount of the world Oil reserves.

They will not stop there next comes the Alaska Animal preserves, our National Parks Etc. They will do whatever they have to do to gain access to oil no matter where it's located.

Remember when Clinton sent troops to Bosnia and Kosavo?? The Republicans including George W. Bush were against that action. Stating it was not in our national interest to prevent the slaughter of thousands of human beings?

"It would be much easier to govern if this were a Dictatorship and I was the Dictator."

GWB Keep your Powder Dry, Tom

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/22/national/22INQU.html?todaysheadlines=&pagewanted=print

--

December 22, 2001

U.S. Inquiry Tried, but Failed, to Link Iraq to Anthrax Attack

By WILLIAM J. BROAD with DAVID JOHNSTON

Shortly after the first anthrax victim died in October, the Bush administration began an intense effort to explore any possible link between Iraq and the attacks and continued to do so even after scientists determined that the lethal germ was an American strain, scientists and government officials said.

But they said that largely secret work had found no evidence to back up the initial suspicions, which is one reason administration officials have said recently that the source of the anthrax was most likely domestic.

For months, intelligence agencies searched for Iraqi fingerprints and scientists investigated whether Baghdad had somehow obtained the so-called Ames strain of anthrax. Scientists also repeatedly analyzed the powder from the anthrax-laced envelopes for signs of chemical additives that would point to Iraq.

"We looked for any shred of evidence that would bear on this, or any foreign source," a senior intelligence official said of an Iraq connection. "It's just not there."

The focus on Iraq was based on its record of developing a germ arsenal and also on what some officials said was a desire on the part of the administration to find a reason to attack Iraq in the war on terrorism.

"I know there are a number of people who would love an excuse to get after Iraq," said a top federal scientist involved in the investigation.

From the start, agents searched for clues in domestic industry, academia and terror groups. But while investigators were racing to link the Ames strain to Iraq, they have only recently begun examining government institutions and contractors in this country that have worked with that strain for years.

In hunting for a culprit in the attacks that killed five people, agents have chased tens of thousands of tips in the past two months and conducted thousands of interviews, law enforcement officials said.

They have traced prescriptions for the antibiotic Cipro, on the chance the perpetrator took the drug to guard against the disease. They have also checked the language and block- style handwriting on letters sent with the anthrax against digital databases of threatening letters maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Secret Service and Capitol Police.

But officials said no likely suspects have emerged and they are settling in for what they fear could be a long haul.

The most promising evidence is still the anthrax itself, which federal scientists and contractors are studying for clues to its origin. The government tried to find links to Afghanistan and Iraq in the substance as well.

One discovery early in the inquiry seemed to undercut the foreign thesis. The anthrax used in the first attack, in Florida, and in subsequent attacks turned out to be the Ames strain, named after its place of origin in Iowa. While investigators found that this domestic variety of anthrax had been shipped to some laboratories overseas, none could be traced to Baghdad.

Nevertheless, government officials continued pushing the Iraq theory, scientists and officials involved in the inquiry said. They saw an intriguing clue in reports that Iraq had tried hard to obtain the Ames strain from British researchers in 1988 and 1989, raising suspicions that it had eventually succeeded.

Federal scientists hunted down records and biological samples from an investigation of Iraq's biological arms program, which was conducted by the United Nations in the 1990's. Those samples were analyzed in laboratories run by two biologists, Paul S. Keim of Northern Arizona University and Paul J. Jackson of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico.

But in the end few samples from Iraq's arsenal were found, and those that were turned out to have nothing in common with the Ames strain, officials said.

A different line of inquiry sought to re-examine seven anthrax strains that the world's largest germ bank, the American Type Culture Collection, in Manassas, Va., sold to Iraq in the 1980's, before the government banned such exports.

None of the strains were identified as Ames. But scientists inside and outside the government speculated that mislabeling might have inadvertently put the potent germ in Baghdad's hands. More laboratory tests were ordered.

Raymond H. Cypess, president of the germ bank, said recent investigations had disproved the mislabeling idea. "We never had it," he said of the Ames strain, "and we can say that on several levels of analysis."

The Iraq inquiry also looked for chemical clues. An early focus was bentonite, a clay additive that is one of the few substances identified publicly that can help reduce the static charge of anthrax spores so they float more freely and potentially infect more people.

Richard O. Spertzel, a retired microbiologist who led the United Nations' biological weapons inspections of Iraq, told investigators that Iraq had explored using bentonite in its germ weapons programs. But Maj. Gen. John Parker of the Army's biological research center at Fort Detrick, Md., said in late October that tests had turned up no signs of aluminum — a main building block of bentonite.

"If I can't find aluminum," General Parker told reporters, "I can't say it's bentonite."

Despite the scientific findings, the sophistication of the anthrax found in the letter mailed to Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader, has kept Dr. Spertzel and others convinced that Iraq or another foreign power could be behind the attacks.

Richard H. Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University who closely follows the anthrax inquiry, recently said that the Baghdad thesis "should not be dismissed as a desperate reach for a casus belli against Iraq" and is still worth investigating.

Publicly, White House officials have made no mention of the failure to find an Iraqi connection, but they have noted the inquiry's intensified focus on the United States. "The evidence is increasingly looking like it was a domestic source," the White House Press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said on Monday.

Tom Ridge, director of homeland security, said in a statement that he initially assumed the culprits were foreigners. "Like many people, when the case of anthrax emerged so close to Sept. 11, I couldn't believe it was a coincidence," Mr. Ridge said. "But now, based on investigative work of many agencies, we're all more inclined to think that the perpetrator is domestic."

It remains unclear whether the focus on Iraq diverted investigators from the domestic inquiry. But some scientists say a decision made early on suggests that it might have.

In early October, F.B.I. raised no objections when officials at Iowa State University, where Ames strain was discovered, said they planned to destroy university's large collection of anthrax spores for security reasons. Many biologists now say that step might have destroyed potential genetic clues to culprit's identity.

Two months later, investigation is largely focused in United States. As scientific inquiry into the anthrax itself continues, the F.B.I. is also employing more traditional forensic and investigative techniques to find out who sent lethal letters.

Agents have compiled lengthy lists of who might have manufactured, tested, transported or stored anthrax. They have questioned manufacturers and marketers of biochemistry equipment and specialized machinery needed to make the material. They have inspected scientific literature, which could provide clues about who has knowledge to make anthrax.

But few clues have emerged. So far only three letters — those sent to NBC, The New York Post and Mr. Daschle — have been analyzed. A fourth letter, sent to Senator Patrick J.Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is undergoing painstaking analysis by a number of laboratories, officials said.

All the letters were photocopies and none appeared to contain any fingerprints. The plastic tape on the envelopes was a mass marketed variety. The paper on which letters were written was an average size. Envelopes were prestamped and widely available. The marks left by photocopier have been carefully studied, but have revealed no clues.

One senior official said nothing the investigators have found has led to anyone who might remotely be called a suspect. Several people who seemed to fit the F.B.I.'s profile of a science loner had been aggressively investigated, but no one has emerged as a serious subject.

"Still, the more you are out there, the more things bubble up," the official said. But asked whether recent news reports of a possible suspect in the case were true, the official replied, "I only wish that was true."

Some tips have seemed encouraging, but only for a time.

"We run out every lead and we give these people a real hard look and real hard shake before we take them off the screen," the official said. "There have been people who we have placed a little higher priority on than others." But then they fall off.

Some senior Bush administration officials have begun to worry privately that the case might take decades to solve, likening it to the Unabomber investigation that baffled investigators for nearly 20 years until David Kaczynski became suspicious of his brother Theodore and alerted F.B.I.

Investigators have used various strategies to find suspects, but have often been frustrated. When they tried to track down people who had sought prescriptions for Cipro in the weeks before the anthrax mailings, the effort quickly bogged down. "Do you know how many people take Cipro in this country?" an exasperated official said, explaining that Cipro is used to treat a variety of ailments.

Investigators also said they were continuing to examine the possibility that the culprit might have purchased stock in the company that makes Cipro in an effort to profit from the attacks.

The newest front in the search for culprits is the examination of government research institutions and contractors. The reason to look there is plain: Some of them have the Ames strain and know how to turn it into deadly powder type used in attacks.

But that has added yet another complication to the already challenging inquiry. After all, investigators have relied on these same experts for scientific advice from the earliest days of investigation, back when Iraq was prime suspect.

"It puts us in a difficult position," one senior law enforcement official said. "We're working with these people and looking at them as potential suspects."

Tarun · January 12, 2002

Simon Lokely of WBAI Pacifica Saturday morning fame has justly declared ENRON'S Employee Anthem to be...

I'm a Loser (Lennon/McCartney)

I'm a loser

And I'm not what I appear to be

Of all the love I have won or have lost

there is one love I should never have crossed

She was a girl in a million, my friend

I should have known she would win in the end

I'm a loser

And I lost someone who's near to me

I'm a loser

And I'm not what I appear to be

Although I laugh and I act like a clown

Beneath this mask I am wearing a frown

My tears are falling like rain from the sky

Is it for her or myself that I cry

I'm a loser

And I lost someone who's near to me

I'm a loser

And I'm not what I appear to be

What have I done to deserve such a fate

I realize I have left it too late

And so it's true, pride comes before a fall

I'm telling you so that you won't lose all

I'm a loser

And I lost someone who's near to me

I'm a loser

And I'm not what I appear to be

Now whether our sometimes unjust judges can rectify this?

Tarun · January 13, 2002

January 8, 2002

Enron Reps Met With Cheney 6 Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 4:59 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Enron Corp. representatives met six times with Vice President Dick Cheney or his aides on the nation's energy policy, including a discussion in mid-October just before the company's sudden collapse.

In a letter to Congress, vice presidential counsel David Addington disclosed the number of meetings between the Bush White House and the former energy giant whose CEO, Ken Lay, has been among President Bush's top political supporters. The company became the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history on Dec. 2.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., released the White House's Jan. 3 letter on Tuesday. He is seeking details of the meetings and information about any telephone calls or e-mails between the vice president's office and Enron.

``An employee of the vice president's staff ... met on Oct. 10, 2001, with Enron representatives and reports that they discussed energy policy matters and did not discuss information concerning the financial position of the Enron Corp.,'' the letter from Cheney's counsel said.

On Oct. 16, Enron announced huge losses, the first in a series of admissions that eventually drove down the price of the company's stock to less than a dollar a share.

Addington said Enron's financial condition wasn't discussed at any of the earlier five meetings.

Cheney met with Lay for half an hour on April 17 to discuss ``energy policy matters, including the energy crisis in California,'' said the letter, citing the only previously publicized meeting between Enron and the vice president or his staff.

The day after meeting with Cheney, Lay said the Bush administration would not support price caps on wholesale energy sales in California, Waxman noted.

``These meetings began on Feb. 22, just over a month after the start of the Bush administration,'' he said. ``They ended on Oct. 10, just six days before Enron announced the $1.2 billion in reduction in shareholder equity.''

The White House letter says the other meetings between Cheney's aides and Enron officials occurred on March 7, April 9 and Aug. 7. The April 9 meeting was with two dozen representatives of utilities, including Enron. The Aug. 7 meeting was with officials of an Enron German subsidiary.

Some of the Enron meetings coincided with the work of Cheney's energy task force, which last May recommended expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and a rejuvenated nuclear power system.

For the past nine months, Cheney has refused to tell congressional Democrats Waxman and Rep. John Dingell of Michigan which power industry executives and lobbyists met with the task force.

The White House disclosures about Enron were prompted by a Dec. 4 letter from Waxman.

Enron sought protection from its creditors in bankruptcy court Dec. 2 amid revelations that questionable partnerships had helped keep billions of dollars in debt off its books. The company acknowledged it overstated profits for four years.

One official on the Cheney energy task force, Lawrence Lindsay, served on an Enron advisory board in 2000, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove sold stock in the company in June.

Lindsay received $50,000 from Enron, according to his financial disclosure form.

Rove owned $68,000 worth of Enron stock when he spoke to Lay about a prospective appointee to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The Center for Public Integrity says that Bush received $146,500 from Enron executives during his two races for Texas governor, with Lay responsible for $122,500 of the total. Enron directors and employees have given $623,000 to Bush during his political career, the center adds. Lay was one of Bush's ``Pioneers'' who raised at least $100,000 for the candidate during the presidential campaign. Lay contributed to the Florida recount and gave $100,000 to the Bush Inaugural.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Tarun · January 15, 2002

NYSE drops Enron; Andersen drops auditor

January 15, 2002 Posted: 2:42 p.m. EST (1942 GMT)

--

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Enron's collapse has led the New York Stock Exchange to formally drop the once high-flying energy firm from its trading list and accounting giant Andersen to fire the lead auditor on its Enron account.

The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading of Enron stock on Tuesday and moved to formally de-list the firm, whose shares once were priced at $84 each but now trade for less than $1.

Officials at the stock exchange cited the company's bankruptcy, its uncertain future and the deep decline in the value of the stock. Enron can appeal the decision to de-list its stock.

"The exchange has determined that the company securities are no longer suitable for trading on the NYSE," Ray Pellecchia, a NYSE spokesman.

Also on Tuesday, accounting firm Andersen said it has fired the lead auditor who worked for Enron and placed three other partners on leave, based on a preliminary investigation into the destruction of documents related to the energy giant's collapse.

Andersen said it is putting new management in charge of its Houston office. (Full story)

The new developments came as the former chairman of a federal regulatory agency charged that the huge energy company had sought to manipulate energy policies to its own advantage. Also, revelations surfaced that a top employee had warned of trouble back in August, while the company's stock was still flying high.

IN-DEPTH VIDEO/AUDIO

• Enron employees pick up the pieces

• Lawyer: Enron execs cooked the books

See also:

11 Americas Pleading the Fifth

Links to more Business stories

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Prabhus: Anyone you know mentioned just a few lines above?

If not, reread more carefully.

Tarun · February 23, 2002

Waxman Shows Lieberman Damning Enron Video

WASHINGTON - 02.21.02 | US Representative Henry A. Waxman, the ranking democrat on the House Government Reform Committee investigating the Enron scandal, today alerted Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joseph I. Lieberman, whose own committee is conducting a parallel investigation into the Enron matter, to the existence a recently obtained video. The video demonstrates pressure brought to bear on Enron employees by Enron executives to buy Enron stock.

An aide to Rep. Waxman Said ; "A videotape of a 1999 Enron employee meeting that Rep. Waxman obtained shows a woman who appears to be Ms. Olson telling employees that they should "absolutely" invest all their 401(k) savings in company stock. This videotape provides evidence that seems to conflict with Ms. Olson's testimony that she would have advised Enron employees to diversify if the law permitted such advice. It also appears to cast Ms. Olson's personal financial transactions in a new light."

Tarun · February 25, 2002

Pardonnez-moi s'il vous plait:

I heard ENRON hiked up electric rates in California.

Anybody on these Forums affected or eyewitnessed?

Tarun · February 26, 2002

Below you'll find Chewco, one of ENRON's 2300 subsidiaries.

catur-vidha zrI bhagavat-prasado..

If Chewco, then why not Lickco, Drunkco & Swallowco too-co?

* * * * * * * *

Feb 26, 2002 Enron Exec Said to Be Aiding in Federal Inquiry

By KURT EICHENWALD

In Depth Understanding Enron

What happened to company, and what implications? A guide

Corporate Culture: At Enron, Lavish Excess Often Came Before Success (February 26, 2002)

Accounting: As Andersen's Overseer, Volcker Won't Settle for Nominal Change (February 26, 2002)

Partnerships: For Enron Executive, Big Profit on Bad Deal (February 26, 2002)

2 Lawyers Named in Enron 401(k) Case (February 26, 2002)

=========================

A senior official from Enron (news/quote)'s finance division, himself a subject of the criminal inquiry into the company's collapse, has begun cooperating with federal officials handling the case, people who have been briefed on the situation said yesterday.

Ben F. Glisan Jr., a former treasurer with Enron who played a central role in the establishment and operation of a byzantine series of partnerships affiliated with the company, has already begun offering information and evidence to both criminal and regulatory investigators, these people said.

Government officials are said to consider Mr. Glisan a crucial participant in the events that led to the debacle at Enron. His name appears on an array of documents involving the partnerships and their transactions. He also worked closely with both Andrew S. Fastow, the former chief financial officer who controlled many of the partnerships, and Michael Kopper, another former official in the finance division with a primary role in the partnerships.

Mr. Glisan, people who have been briefed on the situation said, has already provided prosecutors with what is known as a proffer, in which evidence and testimony a witness could provide in an investigation are described as the first step in obtaining either immunity or a plea deal. No final deal has been reached with Mr. Glisan, the people who have been briefed on the situation said, meaning that no final determination has yet been reached about whether he is fully cooperating and should receive a deal.

Still, there are strong signs that the government believes that it has found an important witness in Mr. Glisan, with prosecutors already appearing to be working to protect him as a witness for any future cases.

For instance, although Mr. Glisan appears from documents to know more about the Enron partnerships than anyone other than Mr. Fastow and Mr. Kopper, he has not been asked to appear before any Congressional committee to explain his actions. That is because Justice Department officials have made it clear to the investigating committees that calling Mr. Glisan to testify — forcing him either to disclose evidence or to take the Fifth Amendment — would severely damage the criminal inquiry. In response, the committees decided to pass on Mr. Glisan's testimony.

"Glisan is a person who is at the center of everything," one lawyer with a role in the Enron investigation said. "He has the potential of being one of the most critical witnesses in this case."

While operating under a proffer agreement, nothing that Mr. Glisan says can be used against him directly, although it can be used to follow up with investigative leads. But if prosecutors find that he has not been fully truthful in his statements, the chances of negotiating a deal worsen — or are eliminated.

Mr. Glisan's lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke 3rd, did not return telephone calls seeking comment. Leslie R. Caldwell, the federal prosecutor who is heading the Enron investigation, declined to comment.

Some lawyers said that Mr. Glisan's cooperation was not surprising, given his representation by Mr. Schuelke, a white-collar defense veteran who is a partner at Janis, Schuelke & Wechsler in Washington. Mr. Schuelke is described by his colleagues in the bar as a lawyer who does not simply reflexively fight potential charges, but recognizes when a client can most benefit by cooperating. A onetime Army lawyer, Mr. Schuelke has represented a number of public figures, including Bert Lance, who served as the budget director in the Carter administration, and Betty Currie, the secretary for former President Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal.

Mr. Glisan's role in the events at Enron's finance division was particularly extensive. He was one of four senior executives who secretly invested in a lucrative partnership known as Southampton Place. Mr. Glisan invested $5,800, which was transformed into about $1 million in a matter of weeks. That transaction was said to be of particular interest to criminal investigators, in part because of the participants: Mr. Fastow and Mr. Kopper were the two largest investors, followed by Mr. Glisan and Kristina Mordaunt, a lawyer who worked for Mr. Fastow and who later became general counsel for Enron's broadband division.

A special committee of the Enron board determined that Mr. Glisan and the other investors violated the company's code of conduct by accepting the interest in Southampton, and they were dismissed from the company last fall.

As an accountant at Enron before his appointment as treasurer, Mr. Glisan worked on a number of transactions that are now central to the investigation into what role, if any, the Fastow partnerships played in the collapse. For example, he was responsible for "transaction support" in the establishment of a partnership known as Chewco. In that role, he had primary responsibility for accounting matters in that transaction, according to a special committee report issued earlier this month.

Accounting issues involving Chewco played an enormous role in the series of shocks that occurred last fall, ultimately leading to the crisis in confidence that threw Enron into its death spiral. Chewco was controlled by Mr. Kopper, who along with his domestic partner, William D. Dodson, received a windfall of some $10 million from their stake in the partnership. Yet, the degree of Mr. Kopper's control of the partnership had been disguised by a side deal that the outside auditor, Arthur Andersen, claims was hidden from it.

Last October, when the board wanted to be fully briefed on Chewco, it called on Mr. Glisan to provide the information. The discovery of the side deals and other accounting issues last fall led the company and Andersen to conclude that Enron had to restate its prior financial reports back to 1997. It is not clear if Mr. Glisan knew of the side deal, but the committee concluded that he may have known of accounting problems.

"Because Mr. Glisan declined to be interviewed by us on Chewco, we cannot speak with certainty about Glisan's knowledge of the facts that should have led to the conclusion that Chewco failed" to meet the standards required for it to be treated as a separate entity from Enron, the committee's report says. "There is, however, substantial evidence that he was aware of such facts."

Mr. Glisan was also a central participant in the structuring and transactions of a group of partnerships known as the Raptors, which also later required restatements of Enron's financial reports. In those partnerships, Mr. Glisan shared responsibility for accounting judgments that, according to the committee report, "went well beyond aggressive."

Southampton was created to profit from one part of the Raptor transaction, with the idea apparently coming from Mr. Fastow and Mr. Kopper, according to the committee report. Internal company documents show that, even though he was profiting off of Enron from that deal, Mr. Glisan still played a principal role in negotiating for the company about Raptor.

Mr. Glisan presented the first Raptor transaction to the company's directors, minutes of board meetings show. Moreover, on approval documents for the first, second and fourth Raptor partnerships, Mr. Glisan was described as the "business unit originator" and the "person negotiating for Enron." Mr. Glisan signed each of these approval documents.

Ultimately, according to committee report, Raptor transactions allowed Enron to avoid reporting some $1 billion in losses over period of little more than a year. When transactions were finally disclosed publicly last fall, results were devastating to Enron.

Tarun · March 8, 2002

In case anyone wondered whence this thread title...

DA DOO RON RON RON by Crystals & Shaun Cassidy

I met him/her on a Monday and my heart stood still