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Good video - http://republicbroadcasting.org/index.php?cmd=videos.video&videoID=136
Enjoy -
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Real Truth Behind Oil Pricing? (video)
- Thread starter 5Pillars
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Thank you, Landis, that makes perfect sense. I should have known that someone with a reptilian brain was behind this. Of course it was Gramm. When i think of the damage that that miserable excuse for a man has done to this country it makes my blood boil. May he rot in hell forever.
It is so sad to see how a few really bad people, and there is no other way to say it, have done what may turn out to be irreparable damage to the once great Republican party. And oddly, Texas has given us all three. Imagine that! Texas, a truly great State filled with kind, giving, and friendly folks. I am thinking now of DeLay, Gramm, and of course G.W. Bush. My god what horrible damage these three individuals have done to our country.
It is so sad to see how a few really bad people, and there is no other way to say it, have done what may turn out to be irreparable damage to the once great Republican party. And oddly, Texas has given us all three. Imagine that! Texas, a truly great State filled with kind, giving, and friendly folks. I am thinking now of DeLay, Gramm, and of course G.W. Bush. My god what horrible damage these three individuals have done to our country.
Just saw the piece in the WSJ about oil companies saying the price of oil is so high because they don't have access to potential large oil reserves. I generally don't like conspiracy theories but one where the oil companies themselves are driving up prices so that they will force governments to give them more access to potential oil fields and make massive profits in the meantime(high prices have hardly been bad for the likes of XOM) would make sense and wouldn't take too much for these players to accomplish.
Apparently even the "seeming good" can be turned to the dark side. Phil Gramm is the Gramm of the 1985 "Gramm-Rudman-Hollings" bill... which was passed into law and mandated that the Federal Gummint stop spending in deficit.
The next near, when it came time to OBEY THE FEDERAL LAW... Congress chucked it into the trash bin like it had never been passed. Apparently "balanced budget spending" was not on Congress's fun list.... and still isn't.
Quote from gnome:
Apparently even the "seeming good" can be turned to the dark side. Phil Gramm is the Gramm of the 1985 "Gramm-Rudman-Hollings" bill... which was passed into law and mandated that the Federal Gummint stop spending in deficit.
The next near, when it came time to OBEY THE FEDERAL LAW... Congress chucked it into the trash bin like it had never been passed. Apparently "balanced budget spending" was not on Congress's fun list.... and still isn't.
It's ironic isn't it, that this same Gramm of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings fame is the Gramm who once said he had provided so much pork for Texas that he was getting trichinosis.
Phil Gramm is back as McCain's chief economic adviser:
McCain Defends 'Enron Loophole'
by Jason Leopold
John McCain May 19, 2008 Sen. John McCain says he opposes the $307 billion farm bill because it would dole out wasteful subsidies, but his chief economic adviser Phil Gramm also wants to stop its proposed regulation of energy futures trading, a market that was famously abused when Enron Corp. manipulated California's electricity prices in 2001.
Clearing the way for that California price gouging, Gramm, as a powerful Texas senator in 2000, slipped an Enron-backed provision into the Commodities Futures Modernization Act that exempted from regulation energy trading on electronic platforms.
Then, over the next year, Enron with Gramm's wife Wendy serving on its board of directors worked to create false electricity shortages in California, bilking consumers out of an estimated $40 billion.
Gramm left the Senate in 2002 but now has emerged as what Fortune magazine calls "McCain's econ brain," not only filling the Arizona senator's acknowledged void on economic expertise ("I don't know as much about the economy as I should") but recognized as one of McCain's closest friends in politics. The two men talk daily.
A McCain aide told me that the Arizona senator opposes the farm bill because it "rewards lobbyists" by granting rich farmers lucrative subsidies, although he would support "a reasonable level of assistance and risk management to farmers when they need America's help."
But the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee also opposes the farm bill because Gramm advised McCain that he should resist its regulatory language on the energy futures market.
Democrats have dubbed that gap in energy futures regulation the "Enron loophole," but it played a part, too, in the more recent attempt by the Amaranth Advisers hedge fund to corner the national gas market by shifting trades to the unregulated "dark markets" of the Intercontinental Exchange.
The "Enron loophole" also has become part of the debate over the soaring price of oil. Last week, a study sponsored by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, concluded that speculative futures markets were partly to blame for the surge in oil prices that have pushed gas at the pump toward $4 a gallon.
At a May 15 news conference, Levin said the skyrocketing price of oil is not the result of supply and demand. Speculators have taken over most of the futures market."[...]
http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/051908Leopold.shtml
Everybody needs to get their ass kicked once in a while.
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LOS ANGELES, June 1, 2004
(CBS) When a forest fire shut down a major transmission line into California, cutting power supplies and raising prices, Enron energy traders celebrated, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports.
"Burn, baby, burn. That's a beautiful thing," a trader sang about the massive fire.
Four years after California's disastrous experiment with energy deregulation, Enron energy traders can be heard â on audiotapes obtained by CBS News â gloating and praising each other as they helped bring on, and cash-in on, the Western power crisis.
"He just f---s California," says one Enron employee. "He steals money from California to the tune of about a million."
"Will you rephrase that?" asks a second employee.
"OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day," replies the first.
The tapes, from Enron's West Coast trading desk, also confirm what CBS reported years ago: that in secret deals with power producers, traders deliberately drove up prices by ordering power plants shut down.
"If you took down the steamer, how long would it take to get it back up?" an Enron worker is heard saying.
"Oh, it's not something you want to just be turning on and off every hour. Let's put it that way," another says.
"Well, why don't you just go ahead and shut her down."
Officials with the Snohomish Public Utility District near Seattle received the tapes from the Justice Department.
"This is the evidence we've all been waiting for. This proves they manipulated the market," said Eric Christensen, a spokesman for the utility.
That utility, like many others, is trying to get its money back from Enron.
"They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"
"Yeah, grandma Millie, man"
"Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."
And the tapes appear to link top Enron officials Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling to schemes that fueled the crisis.
"Government Affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling," says one trader.
"Ok."
"Do you know when you started over-scheduling load and making buckets of money on that?
Before the 2000 election, Enron employees pondered the possibilities of a Bush win.
"It'd be great. I'd love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy," says one Enron worker.
That didn't happen, but they were sure President Bush would fight any limits on sky-high energy prices.
"When this election comes Bush will f------g whack this s--t, man. He won't play this price-cap b------t."
Crude, but true.
"We will not take any action that makes California's problems worse and that's why I oppose price caps," said Mr. Bush on May 29, 2001.
Both the Justice Department and Enron tried to prevent the release of these tapes. Enron's lawyers argued they merely prove "that people at Enron sometimes talked like Barnacle Bill the Sailor."