Free Republic

<p>Congressional investigators examining the collapse of Enron Corp. have focused on e-mails sent by company executives that they said appear to mislead employees into believing the company's plummeting stock would rebound.</p> <p>The e-mails, according to one investigator, could be "a road map to illegal activity" involving high-ranking Enron officials and others.</p>

Sometimes you're damned if you do and damned if you don't -- especially if there's partisan advantage in it. That seems to be the case with the recent controversy involving the Enron Corporation and the Bush administration. It seems Enron executives, hoping for some help, called folks in the Bush administration last fall when signs of the company's financial crisis were becoming clearer to insiders. The Bush appointees listened, checked with their lawyers and did nothing -- which is exactly what they should have done. Now some Democrats want to turn the administration's inaction into a federal case. Rep. ...

<p>The war against terrorism has dropped below the newspaper fold and no longer consistently leads the evening broadcast news programs. Reporters, who are eager to do unto President Bush what they largely failed to do unto Mr. Clinton (hold him properly accountable for his wretched and illegal excesses), are salivating now that they are helping to bring back the politics of personal destruction.</p>

<p>A year ago, 62 percent of Enron's 401(k) retirement funds --worth $1.3 billion -- were invested in the company's stock.</p> <p>Enron had put restrictions on the sale of about 11 percent of the stock, because the shares were given as a match on employee contributions. The rest was purchased by the employees through voluntary salary deductions and could have been sold at any time.</p>

New York, Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Enron appeared to be a dream come true for Democrats, a scandal that fell in their laps when they needed to damage a popular Republican president. They wanted to make it their Whitewater. The close ties between President George W. Bush and Enron Corp.'s CEO Kenneth Lay (Lay is the biggest individual contributor to Bush's presidential and Texas gubernatorial campaigns); the apparent conflict of interest, with Enron standing to benefit from government regulatory decisions; the destruction of documents by auditor Arthur Andersen; the calls from Enron executives to the Treasury and Commerce Departments as ...

WATCHING all the self-contradicting Enron chatter over the weekend reminded me of the quintessential Ronald Reagan anecdote. You remember--the one about the optimistic kid, shoveling manure with a smile on his face. After all, the kid reasoned, "there's got to be a pony in here somewhere." That's pretty much the attitude of Henry Waxman, Joe Lieberman, and the other Democrats most enamored of the Enron scandal. Either Enron had undue influence over a corporatist Bush administration selling its energy policy to the highest bidder (Waxman's pony). Or Enron had too little influence over a Dickensian Bush administration that failed in ...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 — A senior Enron employee explicitly warned the company's chairman in August that several years of improper accounting practices threatened to bring down the company, Congressional investigators said today. "I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals," the employee wrote in an unsigned seven-page letter to Kenneth L. Lay, Enron's chairman and chief executive. Excerpts from the letter were released today by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of five Congressional committees investigating Enron's collapse. The company, which once had a market value of $70 billion, filed for bankruptcy protection ...

found an interesting story in Sunday's Washington Post. It was titled, "Poll Finds Bad News for Democrats Looking for a Traditional Midterm Election Edge." Oh, yes. And you wondered why they are acting like such desperate, panicked fools over this Enron non-story? The story reports, "A solid Democratic advantage going into the 2002 House and Senate races has evaporated in the wake of September 11th, according to a poll taken by the Cook Political Report." So instead of picking up 20 or 30 seats in the House as historical trends showed the Democrats would, they may not gain a ...

Enron fallout extends to Britain LONDON, Jan. 14 (UPI) -- Lord John Wakeham, the former Conservative government minister and the chairman of Britain's Press Complaints Commission, Monday faced the prospect of being called to the U.S. Senate to give evidence on the collapse of the Enron energy corporation. Wakeham, a non-executive director of Enron who holds unsold Enron shares and was reported to be earning $120,000 a year from the firm, had indicated his willingness to go before the Senate's governmental affairs committee to answer any questions, news media reported. Enron employed 5,400 people in Britain and ran three gas-fired ...

POWER to the People "Nonetheless, the power genie is out of its bottle. "The future is here, and the future is competition," says Elizabeth Moler, chairwoman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees federal utilities regulations. In New England and California, which labor beneath electric rates that are 50% or more above the national average, consumers will probably start shopping for electricity next January. Virtually every other state is considering its own deregulation strategy. This trend provides rich possibilities for powerhouses such as Southern, which wants to be Northern, Eastern and Western as well. Southern recently teamed up with ...

Hello everyone, a first time thread poster here. I've got a question that really needs to be answered cause I sure as hell am not going to the network news for help and I know there are an innumerable amount of highly intelligent people here that I can turn to. *smiles* Is Enron really that big a deal? I'm 25 yrs old so I was too young to remember scandals like Watergate. Hell we didn't even get to study Vietnam in HS. I do remember all the crap that went on in the Clinton years, and from what little I've ...

Everyone is focusing on the misconduct of Enron executives, the Arthur Anderson accounting firm that was supposed to be watchdogging Enron's finances, and political connections Enron has with both parties. What people aren't looking at is what caused Enron to go bankrupt. People will say 'deregulation' caused it, then quickly change the subject. That is a lie. Thre was no deregulation of the electrical power markets in California. All they did was restructure the regulations, not remove them. Think about this. There are three main industry groups in the electical power market. First, there are the generators, the companies and ...

Human Rights Watch’s mission is to protect and advance human rights, and our research and advocacy on corporate responsibility is shaped by these concerns alone. Human Rights Watch takes no position on trade or development policies per se. But in an interconnected world where very large and influential transnational corporations compete for finite resources and new markets, human rights and trade are increasingly intertwined. Companies that trade in essential commodities—oil, gas, or electricity—exemplify this phenomenon. In recent years, the energy industry has been embroiled in controversy because of its alleged involvement in situations of human rights violations throughout the world. ...

On Monday, I took my place at the head of the 22 million-strong lecture hall at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, and destroyed the myths of Enron. This is not a "scandal." Not only isn't there even an allegation of scandal, much less proof, there isn't even a way you could think there might be a scandal! Enron failed, with neither the commerce nor treasury secretaries in this administration doing anything to help them - as evidenced by the fact that the company failed. This mountain of myths is now getting higher than Enron's stock at its highest ...

“Those who know when to fight and when not to fight are victorious” – Sun Tzu Congressional Democrats have chosen their first major assault on the presidency of George W. Bush. But they have chosen the wrong time to fight. Two of President Bush’s likely challengers are leading the effort – Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn) and Senate Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD). They have called for an full investigation into the Enron bankruptcy, hopefully to forge a link between the likely illegal and immoral activities of Enron Corporation corporate and the Bush Administration. But the emergence of extensive Internet data resources ...

This is a couple of EMAILS sent and received by me with Don Wycliff the Public Editor of the Chicago Tribune. -----Original Message----- From: GRRRRRR Sent: Friday, January 11, 2002 5:57 PM To: CTC-PublicEditor Subject: Tribune Forgot to Mention... Hi Don, Your ole buddy here, founding member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy...darn glad we reminded Monica to hide that dress...LOL I'm sure it was JUST an oversight this week by the ChiTrib Editorial board and reporters that they haven't reported on the numbers of DEMOCRATS that received campaign donations from ENRON. Yes, that must be it, instead of saying ...

Filed at 7:34 p.m. ET WASHINGTON (AP) -- An Enron (news/quote) employee warned company Chairman Kenneth Lay last August that ``we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals'' unless the company halted practices that eventually sent it into bankruptcy. Two Republican congressmen, including the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on Monday demanded all records relating to a review of the employee's allegations five months ago. The unidentified Enron employee relayed her concerns in a letter to Lay and met with him for an hour to supply documentation, said Reps. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, the committee chairman, ...

Kudlow and Cramer tackle Enron for the full hour. Check them out...I think you'll like them.

The Washington Post October 12, 2000, Thursday, Final Edition SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A23; SPECIAL INTERESTS HEADLINE: Enron Hire Faces Some Partisan Fire BYLINE: Judy Sarasohn In a move that is raising some partisan eyebrows, Enron Corp., whose chief executive is a major supporter of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, has hired a Democrat from the Clinton administration to head its Washington office. Enron announced yesterday that Linda Robertson, assistant Treasury secretary for legislative affairs and public liaison... __snip due to Washington Post bullying__ ..."Enron has just slapped George W. Bush across the face. It just makes little sense," a ...

Poll needs some freeping.... Do you think Bush Administration officials have been fully candid about Enron's collapse?Yes. They've been fully forthright - 30%No. There are more disclosures to come - 56%Who cares? I'm interested in the White House's war on terror - 14%