Greg Palast re Greedy Creatures

AJ: And that makes them even more desperate. So it is really an imperial economy war to implode countries and now they are doing it here with Enron. They are getting so greedy - they are preparing it for this country.

GP: I've just been talking to, out in California just yesterday, from here in Paris, the chief investigators of Enron for the State of California. They are telling me some of the games these guys are playing. No one is watching that. It's not just the stockholders that got ripped off. They sucked millions, billions of dollars out of the public pocket in Texas and California in particular.

AJ: Where are the assets? See, everybody says there are no assets left since Enron was a dummy corporation - from the experts I've had on and they transferred all those assets to other corporations and banks.

GP: Well yea, this stuff has really gone just like a three-card Monty game. I mean remember that there is money at the bottom. You did pay California's electric bills according to the investigations, they are telling me that they were pumped up unnecessarily by 9 to 12 billion dollars. And I don't know who they are going to get it back from now.

AJ: Well they actually caught the Governor buying it for $137 per megawatt and selling it back to Enron for $1 per megawatt and doing it over and over and over again.

... some of the guys who designed the system in California for deregulation then went to work for Enron right after.

... In fact, we saw some interesting documents, a month before Bush took office, Bill Clinton, I think to get even with Bush's big donor, cut Enron out of the California power market. He put a cap on the prices they could charge. They couldn't charge more than one-hundred times the normal price for electricity. That upset Enron. So Ken Lay personally wrote a note to Dick Cheney saying get rid of Clinton's cap on prices. Within 48 hours of George W. Bush taking office, his energy department reversed the clamps on Enron. OK, how much is that worth for those guys. You know that has got to be worth, that paid off in a week all the donations.

...
AJ: ...This looks like coup d'etat here. I'm going to come right out with it. We had better spread the word on this now or these greedy creatures are going to go all the way.

GP: I'm very sad about one thing. I report this story in the main stream press of Britian. I'm on the BBC despite Lord Wakeham. I know he doesn't like me there. I'm in the BBC, I'm in the main daily paper, which is the equivalent of the New York Times or whatever, and we do get the information out. And I'm just very sorry that we have to have an alternative press, an alternative radio network and everything else to get out the information that makes any sense. I mean this information should be available to every American. I mean, after all, it's our government.


lots more at:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0203/S00044.htm