Enron screwed us, Ashcroft covered it up

Ashcroft had these recordings for THREE YEARS and what has Big John done? Nada, of course. Why doesn't he just hang a "BOHICA, California" sign on the Hoover Bldg?

"According to the Snohomish County Public Utility District, which obtained audiotapes of trader conversations from the Justice Department and transcribed them, traders openly discussed creating congestion on transmission lines, taking generating units offline to pump up electricity prices and overall manipulation of the California power market.

For example, 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."

Conversations that involve Forney, Belden and Richter appear throughout the transcripts.

In one of those transcripts, a trader says to Richter, "So, uh, somebody's figured out how to set congestion?"

Richter: "Well, we ... we can set it if we want. I mean, it's not a hard game to do ..."

In another, an Enron trader identified as David discusses shutting down a steamer from a generating unit to increase prices.

"I was wondering, um, the demand out there is er ... there's not much, ah, demand for power at all and we're running kind of fat. Um, if you took down the steamer, how long would it take to get it back up?

"Oh, it's not something you want to just be turning on and off every hour. Let's put it that way," another trader says.

"If we shut it down, could you bring it back up in three — three or four hours, something like that?" David asks.

"Oh, yeah," the other trader says.

"Well, why don't you just go ahead and shut her down, then, if that's OK," David says.

Eric Christensen, a lawyer for the utility district, said it is seeking to convince a FERC administrative law judge that Enron should be ordered to surrender as much as $2 billion in unjust profits.


www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2004-06-02-enron_x.htm