EFFORTPOST Burgers did Loadshedding before it was Cool - The Story of the 2001 California Rolling Blackouts, the comically corrupt energy-magnate Enron, and.....George Bush?

Greetings Dramastrags!

So I've talked a lot about Loadshedding, the rationing of electricity across various districts, at different times, because South Africa's national energy-provider ESKOM, has been too dysfunctional to be able to provide sufficient electricity to cover the whole of the nation's electric-grid all at the same time. Because of this I had been in various internet rabbit holes regarding past occurrences of any events resembling Loadshedding in the past, in other countries.

I was very surprised that the closest similar event in modernity, that wasn't some post natural disaster story in a 3rd world backwater, involved our pals in Burgerland, specifically their powerful and wealthy state of California. Astonishing, because it is one of the wealthiest regions on planet Earth - so how the actual frick did burgers succeed in failing to provide electricity for a whole year, in such an advanced region?

The story involves Enron, the energy company so fricking cartoonishly evil and corrupt, that after their bankruptcy, their implosion would directly lead to much stronger International regulations for corporations in burgerland.

AT ITS HEIGHT ENRON WAS THE 7TH LARGEST CORPORATION IN THE USA:

https://www.citeco.fr/10000-years-history-economics/contemporary-world/collapse-of-enron-the-7th-largest-company-in-the-united-states

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/tutors-problems/Finance/45546828-Before-their-demise-Enron-was-the-7th-largest-public-corporation/

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/

"The story of Enron Corp. depicts a company that reached dramatic heights only to face a dizzying fall. The fated company’s collapse affected thousands of employees and shook Wall Street to its core. At Enron’s peak, its shares were worth $90.75; just prior to declaring bankruptcy on Dec. 2, 2001, they were trading at $0.26."

"To this day, many wonder how such a powerful business—at the time one of the largest companies in the United States—disintegrated almost overnight. Also difficult to fathom is how its leadership managed to fool regulators for so long with fake holdings and off-the-books accounting."

At the end of 2001 however, it was revealed that Enron's reported financial condition was sustained by an institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known since as the Enron scandal. Basically they had cooked the books to such a magnitude, that they had fooled the entire financial world, their investors, and pretty much whole world governments that they were superbly profitable, whilst in reality they were bleeding money and failing in all of their endeavors, having basically only kept afloat by continual new investments

"Enron created EnronOnline (EOL) in October 1999, an electronic trading website that focused on commodities. Enron was the counterparty to every transaction on EOL; it was either the buyer or the seller. To entice participants and trading partners, Enron offered its reputation, credit, and expertise in the energy sector. Enron was praised for its expansions and ambitious projects, and it was named “America’s Most Innovative Company” by Fortune for six consecutive years: 1996–2001."

Enron as a financial entity was considered the greatest scam of the financial world at that time.

ORIGIN OF ENRON: SKILLING AND KEN LAY:

ENRON as we know it, was created as a merger between Lay's Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth n 1987, both relatively small regional companies. This merger was overseen by CEO Ken Lay.

Ken Lay was a hardcore energy-deregulation fanatic supported in yank politics - which meant he believed laws and rules were for busybodies, basically the bad-guy character Frank Fontaine of Bioshock 1 was based on this guy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/23/energy-deregulation-worsened-texas-crisis-enron-is-partly-blame/

======(from article) Eventually, though, energy (like other industries) moved toward deregulation beginning in the late 1970s. Believers in the free market, including Texas energy executives like Enron’s Ken Lay, drove this change, actively pushing for deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s.

Infamously, Enron was a Houston-based energy company that pioneered the use of financial instruments in the natural gas business but collapsed in 2001 after years of accounting fraud came to light. Yet long before Enron became synonymous with white collar crime, the company’s leadership was deeply invested in energy deregulation. After finding success operating in the natural gas market (which had been deregulated in the 1980s), the company’s leaders, Lay and Jeff Skilling, turned their attention to electricity deregulation.

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act into law, which represented a decisive, national step forward in the pursuit of electricity deregulation.

In the mid-'90s, Enron effectively declared war, intending to smash through any barrier standing in the way of electricity deregulation. Drawing on military metaphors, the company’s 1996 annual report stated: “In the U.S. we are moving forward in a state by state advance to support deregulation and quicken its pace.”=======(end)

SKILLING:

The REAL insanity started with a dude named Jeffrey Skilling, the subordinate of Ken Lay. Skilling was so monumentally corrupt and psycopathic that I believe American Psycho was based on this nut.

"Skilling wanted to change Enron from a gas supply company into a stock market for natural gas."

Over the course of the 1990s, Enron made a few changes to its business plan that greatly improved the perceived profitability of the company. First, Enron invested heavily in overseas assets, specifically energy. Another major shift was the gradual transition of focus from a producer of energy to a company that acted more like an investment firm and sometimes a hedge fund, making profits off the margins of the products it traded. These products were traded through the Gas Bank concept, now called the Enron Finance Corp. and headed by Skilling. In 1991, he became the chairman of Enron Gas Services Co.

Enron became known as the Wall Street Darling under Skilling.

ENRON POLITICAL TIES WITH BUSH:

https://progressive.org/magazine/meet-enron-bush-s-biggest-contributor/

=====(from article) Texas activists say that the tight connection between Bush and Lay bodes ill if Bush is elected. Andrew Wheat, from Texans for Public Justice, a campaign finance advocacy group in Austin, compares the symbiotic relationship between Enron and the governor to "cogeneration"--a process used by utilities to harness waste heat vented by their generators to produce more power. "In a more sinister form of cogeneration, corporations are converting economic into political power," he says. "A Bush election fueled by Enron dollars could ignite in the public policy arena, and consumers would get burned."=====

Before Bush was even elected, many politically savvy peeps in burgerland were already sweating bullets at the impending horror of a parasitical relationship between a Bush-administration and Enron

===== (continuing from article) And so may people in the Third World.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both criticized Enron for colluding with police who brutally suppressed protests at the company's giant power plant in western India. The plant's operating firm is called the Dabhol Power Company. From 1992 to 1998, Enron owned 80 percent of it, with General Electric and Bechtel each holding a 10 percent share. (In 1998, the Indian state electricity board bought a 30 percent share of the company, which reduced Enron's stake to 50 percent.)

"The project has met with opposition from local people and activists from elsewhere in India on the grounds of its social, economic, and environmental impact," Amnesty wrote in a July 1997 report. "Protesters and activists have been subjected to harassment, arbitrary arrest, preventive detention under the ordinary criminal law, and ill treatment. Amnesty International considers those who have been subjected to arrest and temporary periods of imprisonment as a result of undertaking peaceful protest to be prisoners of conscience, imprisoned solely for exercising their right to freedom of expression."

For years, the plant has been the site of many nonviolent protests.

Just before dawn on June 3, 1997, police stormed the homes of several women. "The policemen forcibly opened the door and dragged me out of the house into the police van parked on the road. (While dragging me) the police kept beating me on my back with batons. The humiliation meted out to the other members of my family was similar to the way I was humiliated. . . . My one-and-a-half-year-old daughter held on to me but the police kicked her away," says Sugandha Vasudev Bhalekar--a twenty-four-year-old housewife who was three months pregnant at the time of her arrest, according to Amnesty's report. Amnesty found that another pregnant woman was beaten and several other women sustained injuries, including bruising, abrasions, and lacerations on arms and legs.

A January 1999 investigation by Human Rights Watch came to a stronger conclusion. "Human Rights Watch believes that the Dabhol Power Corporation and its parent company Enron are complicit in these human rights violations," it said. "The company, under provisions of law, paid the abusive state forces for the security they provided to the company. These forces, located adjacent to the project site, were only stationed there to deal with protests.===========

Lol ENRON was basically like the corporations out of fricking Robocop.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/feb/02/enron.usnews

Holy smokes. How you yanks didn't lynch Bush from his office is unknown to me. This was such an open sore of corruption. I guess wingcuckery was already full swing to Bush win the election in 2004, after this astonishingly open secret of corruption.

KENNY BOY:

George Bush was so fricking familiar with the founder of ENRON, that he was on a nickname basis with the fricking CEO. The media would bleat and screed after the collapse of ENRON in 2002, when it came out that Bush would refer to Ken, as 'Kenny Boy'.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/kenny-boys-connections/

"The Bush Family consistently acted to put Enron and its longtime CEO Ken Lay into a position to rip off investors and taxpayers. Why is the mass media ignoring that fact now that Lay has been convicted in arguably the most egregious example of white-collar fraud in US history?"

"Until he hooked up with the Bushes, Lay was just another mid-level energy trader complaining endlessly about being hemmed in by onerous government regulations and those terrible consumer lawyers who prevent free market hustlers from doing their thing. But after he and his company became top supporters of the Bushes–eventually giving $3 million combined to various Bush electoral campaigns and the Republican Party–doors opened"

"A long list of George H. W. Bush’s Cabinet and inner circle, including Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher, went to work for Enron after his 1992 defeat. An even greater number of Enron officials returned the favor by joining the George W. Bush Administration in 2001 shortly before the Enron scandal exploded."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-edges-away-from-kenny-boy/

Just to demonstrate the fragrant conflict of interests.

ENRON COOKS THE BOOKS:

Enron continiously grew, and did so profitably according to their own accounting books, when in reality the entire conglomerate was a hollowed out carcass of debt and loss. But if the company was so tremendously unprofitable in reality, how the frick did they hide this from the gov and investors?

Basically this article explains: they used what's called Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV)

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/#toc-how-did-enron-hide-its-debt

"Fastow and others at Enron orchestrated a scheme to use off-balance-sheet special purpose vehicles (SPVs), also known as special purposes entities (SPEs), to hide Enron’s mountains of debt and toxic assets from investors and creditors.2 The primary aim of these SPVs was to hide accounting realities rather than operating results.

The standard Enron-to-SPV transaction would be the following: Enron would transfer some of its rapidly rising stock to the SPV in exchange for cash or a note. The SPV would subsequently use the stock to hedge an asset listed on Enron’s balance sheet. In turn, Enron would guarantee the SPV’s value to reduce apparent counterparty risk."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spv.asp

"A special purpose vehicle, also called a special purpose entity (SPE), is a subsidiary created by a parent company to isolate financial risk. Its legal status as a separate company makes its obligations secure even if the parent company goes bankrupt. For this reason, a special purpose vehicle is sometimes called a bankruptcy-remote entity."

It's like creating random shitcoins, but with child companies, and throwing all the bad debt onto this child company, so it soaks up all the monumental bad credit you've build up, and they would stave of the overall company's bankruptcy for over a decade.

THE WALL STREET DARLING CRUMBLES:

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/#toc-the-wall-street-darling-crumbles

"By the fall of 2000, Enron was starting to crumble under its own weight. Skilling hid the financial losses of the trading business and other operations of the company using MTM accounting. This technique measures the value of a security based on its current market value instead of its book value. This can work well when trading securities but can be disastrous for actual businesses.

In Enron’s case, the company would build an asset, such as a power plant, and immediately claim the projected profit on its books, even though the company had not made one dime from the asset. If the revenue from the power plant was less than the projected amount, instead of taking the loss, the company would then transfer the asset to an off-the-books corporation, where the loss would go unreported. This type of accounting enabled Enron to write off unprofitable activities without hurting its bottom line."

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/28/us/enron-s-many-strands-early-scrutiny-10-months-ago-questions-enron-came-went-with.html

"Ten months ago, Bethany McLean of Fortune magazine became the first journ*list to highlight hard questions about Enron's balance sheet. The most startling fact she revealed was the absence of crucial information in the company's financial reports. ''How exactly does Enron make its money?'' she wrote.

Her questions were so pointed that Enron's chief executive, Jeffrey K. Skilling, called her unethical for failing to do more research. Three Enron executives flew to New York in an unsuccessful effort to convince her editors that she was wrongheaded. Enron's chairman, Kenneth L. Lay, called Fortune's managing editor, Rik Kirkland, to complain that Fortune was relying on a source who stood to profit if the share price fell."

The legendary article in question which initialized the shitcanning of Enron's stocks: Is Enron Overpriced?

https://fortune.com/2015/12/30/is-enron-overpriced-fortune-2001/

Unfortunately it's paywalled and I'm not fricking paying. The gist is, she asked Skilling stupidly simple questions, like how the company made money, or what it's main trading was, or how profitable certain ventures were, and the guy squeaked. He tried to bullshit the reported woman Mclean, by sending accountants to answer her with BS.

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/#toc-the-wall-street-darling-crumbles

"Skilling, Enron’s former CEO, ultimately received the harshest sentence of anyone involved in the scandal. In 2006, Skilling was convicted of conspiracy, fraud, and insider trading. Skilling originally received a 17½-year sentence, but in 2013, it was reduced by 14 years. As a part of the new deal, Skilling was required to give $42 million to the victims of the Enron fraud and to cease challenging his conviction. Skilling was originally scheduled for release on Feb. 21, 2028, but was instead released early on Feb. 22, 2019.

Enron’s collapse and the financial havoc that it wreaked on its shareholders and employees led to new regulations and legislation to promote the accuracy of financial reporting for publicly held companies. In July 2002, then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. The act heightened the consequences for destroying, altering, or fabricating financial statements and for trying to defraud shareholders. U.S. Congress. “H.R.3763 — Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002.”

HOW IS ENRON RELEVANT TO THE CALIFORNIA BLACKOUTS??

The above walls of text was to give context to the sheer magnitude of greed and corruption involved with the core leadership of Enron. It also showed how desperate the top leaders of Enron became by the time the year 2000 arrived, as they knew the influx of new investments would not be indefinite.

https://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/OurEnergyFuture/TheCaliforniaElectricityCrisisLessonsfortheFuture.aspx

The 2000–01 California electricity crisis, also known as the Western U.S. energy crisis of 2000 and 2001, was a situation in which the U.S. state of California had a shortage of electricity supply caused by market manipulations and capped retail electricity prices. Rolling blackouts became a common occurrence in California, in spite of the fact that the state on paper supposedly had twice the supply wattage than its daily demand.

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/02/03/enron.tapes/

https://archive.ph/20120905051311/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/national/04energy.html?ex=1107666000&en=01449ebf62df572e&ei=5070

The primary cause of these blackouts was market manipulation by Enron executives.

=====(from article) The tapes and memorandums were made public by a small public utility north of Seattle that is fighting Enron over a power contract. They also showed that Enron, as early as 1998, was creating artificial energy shortages and running up prices in Canada in advance of California's larger experiment with deregulation.

The tapes provide new details of market manipulation during the California energy crisis that produced blackouts and billions of dollars of surcharges to homes and businesses on the West Coast in 2000 and 2001.======

This artificial supply manipulation across the california grid caused electricity prices to rise over 800% from April 2000 to December 2000.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-24-me-4235-story.html

BURGERLAND LOADSHEDDING:

https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/report/R_103CWR.pdf

Outside of inconveniencing consumers, many businesses were financially impacted by the unsteady supply of electricity. The state of California was SUPPOSED to have installed over 45 GW of generation capacity, and had only an a daily demand of 28 GW, so where was all that electricity going?? Enron traders took power plants offline for maintenance in days of peak demand to increase the price. Traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of 20 times its normal value.

Stage 3 emergency scheduling meant a similar structure as South Africa where americans in California would schedule blackouts over predetermined timeframes, to share the load of not having power over separate regions. But compared to RSA, california's rolling blackouts tended to be more spontaneous and erratic, because Enron executives would phone powerplant Overseers to order them to shut down, or disable their powerplants at random times.

Here's a timeline of the events:

It's only after the bankruptcy of Enron, when the power manipulation stopped, and records and tapes between plant managers and Enron executives surfaced, and journ*lists circled Enron like hungry sharks.

Anyways compared to RSA, shit and corrupt offcials actually tend to lose popularity in Burgerland, and the event basically lasted about only a year, and wasn't as astronomically intrusive as modern RSA loadshedding.

The Bush family somehow, both Senior and Junior, with their slimy friendship with the Enron CEO's, appeared to not have lost any of their popularity. I have no idea what Yanks though of Bush at that moment in time, maybe other events like 9/11 and the planning of the Iraq war was overwhelming the public conscience at that moment in time, older yanks should tell me if they remember this fiasco.

Anyways, that's all I got, GOOD DAY