OLD STORY, NEW WRINKLE PART TWO:
Enron plotted to shut down power plant

From CNN courtesy of This Modern World:

A Washington state utility released audiotapes Thursday that it said revealed bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp. plotted to take a power plant off-line in 2001 to jack up electric prices in Western states.

That same day, shortages of power forced rolling blackouts in northern California that affected about 2 million customers.

And

Eric Christensen, the utility's assistant general counsel, said the tapes show Enron was planning to manipulate Western power markets as early as 1998 -- before California's deregulated energy market opened.

And

Earlier tapes obtained during the Enron-Snohomish lawsuit indicated Enron had manipulated the Western power grid for a year and a half.

Those tapes include traders gloating profanely about overcharging "Grandma Millie" in California.

Click here for the rest.

The point here is not that Enron was a one of the greedier evil corporations out there—we already knew that. Rather, the point is that all this information is coming out in lawsuits instead of federal investigations.

Remember how when California’s rolling blackouts were occurring the Bush administration’s stance was that the crisis had nothing to do with corporate manipulations resulting from the state’s recent energy industry deregulation. They asserted every conceivable explanation they could come up with except for what was actually happening: energy corporations were manipulating energy prices because the new deregulation laws allowed them to do so!

This kind of federal stonewalling is continuing apparently. As the CNN article notes:

Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington accused FERC of dragging its feet in reviewing the case, even though its staff, she said, has found "documentation of criminal activity."

"That means a little utility in the state of Washington has actually had to become the private investigator, the policeman on the beat, their own counsel and attorney before the FERC -- and at their own expense do the job that federal investigators and regulators should do," Cantwell said.

My best guess is that this stonewalling isn’t about protecting Enron’s key players so much as it is about protecting the conservative idealization of corporate deregulation. If it ever becomes achingly clear to the public at large that “getting the government off the people’s backs” often means getting the corporations onto the people’s backs, conservatives are in big trouble. Here’s hoping.

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