corrente

Certainly one way to pay off the lawyers! And the book practically writes itself, doesn't it? Robert Bryce lifts up the Enron rock in Salon and finds all kinds of crawly, squirmy things:

Lay could dish the dirt on several important topics: the [1] Karl Rove-brokered push that resulted in Enron paying Christian conservative turned super-lobbyist Ralph Reed $300,000; [2] Lay's dealings with secretary of state turned super-lobbyist James Baker; [3] why Enron hired Ed Gillespie, the man who now heads the Republican National Committee; [4] the reason for Lay's decision to allow the Bushes to use Enron's fleet of airplanes as their own; [5] what happened in those meetings with Dick Cheney and his energy task force; and [6] what really happened with the California energy crisis.
(via Salon)

Of course, Lay would have to ask fast; the book would need to hit the stands by, say, late October.... Anyhow, Bryce picks [6] as the hot topic: The phony California energy "crisis" scam:

Or better still, what might Lay tell us about the California energy crisis? Some may recall that Lay had a private meeting with Cheney on April 17, 2001, to talk about the [California] energy markets, which were reeling from skyrocketing power prices. During the meeting, Lay told Cheney that the federal government should not impose any restrictions on the markets. His memo to Cheney said that "the administration should reject any attempt to re-regulate wholesale power markets by adopting price caps." Even temporary price restrictions, the memo argued, "will be detrimental to power markets and will discourage private investment."

Cheney immediately began parroting Lay's argument. The day after the meeting, Cheney mocked the idea of price caps during an interview with a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, saying caps would provide only "short-term political relief for the politicians." He also said they would discourage investment, a matter Cheney called "the basic fundamental problem."

Today we know [and Paul Krugman wrote at the time—Lambert] that one of the fundamental problems with the California energy crisis was that traders from Enron and other energy companies were manipulating power prices at their whim -- and that they liked to joke about how they were taking money from those "poor grandmothers in California." Lay could tell us when he first learned that his traders were making huge profits by scamming California's gas and electricity markets.

Oh, and those thieving traders? Faithful Republicans, every single one. Let's watch Republican values in action. From the trading transcripts:

On the calls, traders openly and gleefully discussed creating congestion on transmission lines, taking generating units offline to pump up electricity prices and overall manipulation of the California power market.

They also kidded about Enron's hefty political contributions -- particularly to Bush's 2000 presidential campaign -- and how that could translate into more opportunity for profit in California.

"I'd love to see Ken Lay be secretary of energy," one trader said, referring to the now-disgraced former Enron chief executive whose ties to the Bush administration have drawn criticism from Democrats.

In one transcript, a trader asks about "all the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers of California."

To which the Enron trader responds, "Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she's the one who couldn't figure out how to (expletive) vote on the butterfly ballot."
(AP via the Seattle Post Intelligencer

Funny ha-ha, eh?

Looting, lying, lawbreaking—Republican values in action!