De Bush Bende 12

Dit is president Bush met zijn belangste particuliere financier Ken Lay, de voormalige baas van Enron. 'Enron CEO Ken Lay personally contributes $290,000 to George W Bush's presidential campaign.
Enron CEO Ken Lay is named as a member of President George W Bush's transition team.
17 May 2001
Enron CEO Ken Lay meets with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Milken, and 12 other California Republicans at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. There they share (according to Enron emails) "an insider's conversation of what's going on with the energy situation." Later, during his campaign for governor, Schwarzenegger claims he is unable to remember anything about the meeting, including whether he even met Ken Lay.
30 Jun 2001
The White House admits that political adviser Karl Rove was involved in administration energy policy meetings, while at the same time holding stock in energy companies including Enron.
15 Oct 2001
Enron CEO Ken Lay telephones Commerce Secretary Don Evans.
28 Oct 2001
Enron CEO Ken Lay telephones Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.
29 Oct 2001
Enron CEO Ken Lay telephones Commerce Secretary Don Evans, asking him to dissuade Moody's from downgrading Enron's credit rating.
8 Nov 2001
Arthur Andersen receives a federal subpoena for Enron documents.
2 Dec 2001
Enron files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
3 Dec 2001
Enron lays off 4,000 employees.
22 Jan 2002
A former Enron employee testifies that she saw people shredding documents after the investigation was announced.
23 Jan 2002
Enron CEO Ken Lay resigns as CEO.
25 Jan 2002
The body of former Enron vice chairman John Clifford Baxter is found in his car. His suicide note is released in April.
1 Feb 2002
The Department of Justice instructs the White House to preserve any and all Enron documents.
4 Feb 2002
Ken Lay resigns from Enron's board of directors.
17 Jul 2003
Without admitting any wrongdoing, Enron agrees to pay the state of New Jersey $109,000 to settle claims that the corporation had made 30 illegal state campaign contributions in 1999.
9 Apr 2004
At 4:00 a.m., New York police officers responding to a complaint that an emotionally disturbed person was "pulling on people's clothes and shouting aloud with intent to annoy" found themselves face to face with none other than the former Enron CEO, Jeffrey Skilling. Skilling was standing on the corner of Park Avenue and East 73rd Street: highly intoxicated, uncooperative, and making accusations at passers-by. "You're an FBI agent and you're following me," he was reported as shrieking. He ran up to several patrons in a Manhattan bar and "pulled open" their clothes. Police took Skilling to the New York Presbyterian Hospital for observation.' Zie: http://www.rotten.com/library/crime/corporate/enron/

Consortium News bericht: 'Bush's Enron Lies.
Four years ago, when the taboo against calling George W. Bush a liar was even stronger than it is today, the national news media bought into the Bush administration's spin that the President did nothing to bail out his Enron benefactors, including Kenneth Lay.
Bush supposedly refused to intervene, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Enron had poured into his political coffers. That refusal purportedly showed the high ethical standards that set Bush apart from lesser politicians.
Bush's defenders will probably reprise that storyline now that former Enron Chairman Lay and former Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling stand convicted of conspiracy and fraud in the plundering of the onetime energy-trading giant. But the reality is that the Bush-can't-be-bought spin was never true.
For instance, the documentary evidence is now clear that in summer 2001 - at the same time Bush's National Security Council was ignoring warnings about an impending al-Qaeda terrorist attack - NSC adviser Condoleezza Rice was personally overseeing a government-wide task force to pressure India to give Enron as much as $2.3 billion.
Then, even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when India's cooperation in the "war on terror" was crucial, the Bush administration kept up its full-court press to get India to pay Enron for a white-elephant power plant that the company had built in Dabhol, India.
The pressure on India went up the chain of command to Vice President Dick Cheney, who personally pushed Enron's case, and to Bush himself, who planned to lodge a complaint with India's prime minister. Post-9/11, one senior U.S. bureaucrat warned India that failure to give in to Enron's demands would put into doubt the future functioning of American agencies in India.
The NSC-led Dabhol campaign didn't end until Nov. 8, 2001, when the Securities and Exchange Commission raided Enron's offices - and protection of Lay's interests stopped being political tenable. That afternoon, Bush was sent an e-mail advising him not to raise his planned Dabhol protest with India's prime minister who was visiting Washington. [For details on the Dabhol case, see below.]
Contrary to the official story, the Bush administration did almost whatever it could to help Enron as the company desperately sought cash to cover mounting losses from its off-the-books partnerships, a bookkeeping black hole that was sucking Enron toward bankruptcy and scandal.
As Enron's crisis worsened through the first nine months of Bush's presidency, Lay secured Bush's help in three key ways:
· Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity in California at a time when Enron was artificially driving up the price of electricity by manipulating supply. Bush's resistance to price caps bought Enron extra time to gouge hundreds of millions of dollars from California's consumers.
· Bush granted Lay broad influence over the development of the administration's energy policies, including the choice of key regulators to oversee Enron's businesses. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was replaced in 2001 after he began to delve into Enron's complex derivative-financing schemes.
· Bush had his NSC staff organize that administration-wide task force to pressure India to accommodate Enron's interests in selling the Dabhol generating plant for as much as $2.3 billion.' Lees verder:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/052506.html Of: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052606J.shtml

Deze affaire is mede het resultaat van het privatiseren en dereguleren van de energie door de neoliberalen. Desondanks volgt het kabinet Balkenende dit Amerikaans initiatief.