Let's talk about Enron. What the fuck happened here?

They created the California energy crisis to double prices (profit), by shutting down their plant during peak hours.

Gray Davis, the governor at the time, was receiving campaign contributions from them. He was recalled.

You can read about it here:

>Newly discovered tapes have revealed how the energy corporation Enron shut down at least one power plant on false pretences, deliberately aggravating California's crippling 2001 blackouts with the aim of raising prices.
>theguardian.com/business/2005/feb/05/enron.usnews
>theguardian.com/business/2002/feb/14/corporatefraud.enron1

Deregulation without a preexisting competitive marketplace.

Enron never owned a single power plant. California's energy troubles were their own making. The left wanted a fall guy and Enron was already in trouble so why not them?

Damn, I like this topic.

I have to go to sleep.

But the one guy made out like a bandit. Got a stripped pregnant and in his divorce had to liquidate all of his Enron stock.

He ends up a multimillionaire and goes to retire in Hawaii.

Enron fails but no one goes to take his money away because he didnt sell his stock intentionally. The courts made him sell it.

Fucking based.

Enron employees called power plants to tell them to shut down.

---
On one tape, an Enron official named Bill tells an employee called Rich at a Las Vegas power plant to take the plant offline on a confected excuse. The conversation took place on January 17 2001, in the last days of the Clinton administration, as blackouts were rolling across California, cutting off electricity to more than one million people, and after the energy secretary, Bill Richardson, had ordered generators across the west to direct their output to the troubled state.

"Ah, we want you guys to get a little creative, and come up with a reason to go down," Bill says on the tape. "Anything you want to do over there? Any cleaning, anything like that?"

"OK, so we're just comin' down for some maintenance, like a forced outage type thing?" Rich replies, according to transcripts published yesterday. "I think that's a good plan, Rich," Bill says. "... I knew I could count on you."

theguardian.com/business/2005/feb/05/enron.usnews

Well for one thing they created power outages to increase their customer's electric bills, and then laughed about it.

So like most ".com" bubble companies? If you think about it, it was actually genius because they were making a profit doing doing and employees as shareholders still got that dosh.. but I guess they're evil for being a business and coming up with a smart way to kick their business into the clouds. Everything "illegal" was only considering illegal retroactively because of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act which was passed after the fact, before that it was just.. well, unethical.

They didn't own that plant, they owned know they were specifically an energy re-seller after the merger. Just because the Energy secretary order something didn't mean they had to comply, they were a reseller and had no ownership on the generators just the energy produced and because of the deregulation of utilities in California they as a private for profit could do whatever they wanted. If the energy secretary told you to turn off your power breaker and you didn't you have no actual obligation to do it. Besides, the plant could have said "No."

In reality, Enron was a great money maker and proved that A) Deregulation is good for certain areas namely natural gas supply but terribly for hardlined utilities because one line systems are horrible to actually sort out in accounting, and as a private company it made a shit load of money using unethical but legal at the time measures for the most part. Did they over inflate their income because it was a fraud? Yes. Did other companies in California horrifically fail because they did the same but didn't have the business savy to bring in investor money to make up for it because 10 companies providing power down one line is stupid as fuck and results in no actual way to determine you profits beyond meter reading and even then you're wasting money and energy with several companies pumping megawatts of energy into an area and sending out meter readers, oh hell yeah that's retarded. They had the savy to cover up the losses though.

Lol, Idiots thought they were too big to fail. Fucking Tards.

Is this intentional?

yes

Cool, I never noticed it before

im pretty sure i would have stuck a pistol in my mouth had i been one of the people who invested.

literally yes

excellent documentary that.