~terry
Sun, Mar 3, 2002 (09:59)
seed
Enron.
"Enron is a scandal so enormous that it's hard to wrap your mind around it.
Not just a single financial disaster, it's actually a jigsaw of interlocking
scandals, each outrageous in its own right."
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12525
Enron
~terry
Sun, Mar 3, 2002 (09:59)
#1
The direct link to that story is:
The Enron-Cheney-Taliban Connection?
Ron Callari, Albion Monitor
February 28, 2002
Enron is a scandal so enormous that it's hard to wrap your mind around it.
Not just a single financial disaster, it's actually a jigsaw of interlocking
scandals, each outrageous in its own right.
There's Enron the Wall St. con game, where company bookkeepers used slight
of hand to turn four years of steady losses into stunning profits. There's
Enron the reverse Robin Hood, which stole from its own employees even as its
executives were hauling millions of dollars out the backdoor. There's
Enron's Ken Lay the Kingmaker, who used the corporation's fraudulent wealth
to broker elections and skew public policy to his liking. And then there are
the Enron coverups, as documents are shredded and the White House seeks to
conceal details about meetings between Enron and Vice President Cheney.
The coverups are still very much a mystery. What were the documents that
were fed into the shredder -- even after the corporation declared
bankruptcy? What is the White House fighting to keep secret, even going to
the length of redefining executive privilege and inviting the first
Congressional lawsuit ever filed against a president? Were the consequences
of releasing these documents more damaging than the consequences of
destroying them?
Could the Big Secret be that the highest levels of the Bush Administration
knew during the summer of 2001 that the largest bankruptcy in history was
imminent? Or was it that Enron and the White House were working closely with
the Taliban -- including Osama bin Laden -- up to weeks before the Sept. 11
attack? Was a deal in Afghanistan part of a desperate last-ditch "end run"
to bail out Enron? Here's a tip for Congressional investigators and federal
prosecutors: Start by looking at the India deal. Closely.
Enron had a $3 billion investment in the Dabhol power plant, near Bombay on
India's west coast. The project began in 1992, and the liquefied natural
gas- powered plant was supposed to supply energy- hungry India with about
one-fifth of its energy needs by 1997. It was one of Enron's largest
development projects ever (and the single largest direct foreign investment
in India's history). The company owned 65 percent of Dabhol; the other
partners were Bechtel, General Electric and State Electricity Board.