Free Republic

The youngest son of jailed former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling has been found dead in his college apartment. John Taylor Skilling, who went by the nickname JT, was just 20 years old. He was a sophomore at Chapman University in Orange, California. Mystery surrounds his death after authorities ruled out foul play or suicide, his father's attorney Daniel Petrocelli said. The Orange County Coroner's office said the death is under investigation. Toxicology results will take four to six weeks. A local TV station reported there was 'no obvious' cause of death. Mr Petrocelli told CNBC that classmates became concerned when...

JERUSALEM – The Egyptian government has information a diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Cairo secretly met yesterday with a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the nation's major Islamist opposition group, WND has learned. The topic of the meeting was the future of Egypt following the "fall" of President Hosni Mubarak, an Egyptian intelligence official told WND. The claim comes amid charges from Cairo that the Obama administration has been encouraging the protests rocking Egypt and targeting the rule of Mubarak, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. The Egyptian intelligence official told WND his government has information...

Unlike the private sector, government accounting is unaccountable. Governments are free to toss out ridiculous figures without an audit or criticism – Pres. Obama’s stimuli have save 3 million jobs, please. One way governments claim to save money is through creative financing that would be illegal in the private sector. One recent example is the Denver bus system’s claim that it has saved $1.9 bln on a future train to the local airport. This savings is huge, considering the project’s budget is $2.3 bln. Nobody in the press questioned the improbability of such amazing savings or how the simple math...

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Supreme Court found fault Thursday with the federal government's high-profile convictions of Enron's Jeffrey Skilling and former media mogul Conrad Black, rejecting the government's use of a key white-collar crime law on which part of the prosecutions were based. Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling in April 2006. The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday found fault with the federal government's convictions of Enron's Jeffrey Skilling and former media mogul Conrad Black. The justices sent the cases back to two different lower courts to determine whether portions of Messrs. Skilling and Black's convictions should be thrown out. In ruling for...

New Orleans Radio personality unloads on BP and Feds. See video on right side of page.

You think the action in Procter & Gamble was weird, check out the nosedive on Accenture, which plummeted from above $40 at 2:47 p.m. to $0.01 at 2:48 p.m. Had demand for consulting services declined so sharply in that one minute? Obviously there was some sort of technical snafu out there. Still, it seems that the worries in Greece were seriously worsening Thursday. So how much of that scare was robots gone wild and how much was sensible worry from flesh and blood investors? We’ll have to wait and see, though we did close down more than 3% on the...

A lot of people have wondered why its taken Obama so long to respond to the oil spill disaster in the Gulf. Well, now we know. During the 2008 election cycle, individuals and political action committees associated with BP — a Center for Responsive Politics’ “heavy hitter” — contributed half a million dollars to federal candidates. About 40 percent of these donations went to Democrats. The top recipient of BP-related donations during the 2008 cycle was President Barack Obama himself, who collected $71,000.

Campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs employees to President Obama are nearly seven times as much as President Bush received from Enron workers, according to numbers on OpenSecrets.org. President Bush's connections to Enron were well-hyped during the company's accounting debacle that rippled through the economy. Time magazine even had an article called, "Bush's Enron Problem." The Associated Press ran with the headline, "Bush-backing Enron makes big money off crisis." David Callaway wrote that Enron for Bush was worse than Whitewater for Clinton.

Campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs employees to President Obama are nearly seven times as much as President Bush received from Enron workers, according to numbers on OpenSecrets.org. President Bush's connections to Enron were well-hyped during the company's accounting debacle that rippled through the economy. Time magazine even had an article called, "Bush's Enron Problem." The Associated Press ran with the headline, "Bush-backing Enron makes big money off crisis." David Callaway wrote that Enron for Bush was worse than Whitewater for Clinton. But the mere $151,722.42 (inflation adjusted) in contributions from Enron-affiliated executives, employees, and PACs to Bush hardly add up...

March 12, 2010, 8:00 pm The bankruptcy examiner’s report filed by Anton R. Valukas on the 2008 demise of Lehman Brothers discusses some accounting gimmicks that are eerily reminiscent of how Enron tried to prop up its balance sheet back in 2001 before it collapsed. Both companies appear to have played right along the edge of properly accounting for transactions designed to make them appear much stronger than they turned out to be, becoming steadily more aggressive as they teetered on the brink of ruin. Peter J. Henning, writing for DealBook’s White Collar Watch, is a commentator on white-collar crime...

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Former Enron chief executive Jeff Skilling lost the first half of the fight of his life when a jury convicted him nearly four years ago for committing fraud while at the helm of the once high-flying energy trader. On Monday before the U.S. Supreme Court, lawyers for federal prisoner 29296-179 will take their last shot at shredding a lower court's conviction that sentenced him to 24 years in jail. If Skilling succeeds, his sentence could be shortened or he could win a new trial. The federal government already has a 0-2 Enron record before the high court...

Reading The Herald Tribune over breakfast in Hong Kong harbor last week, my eye went to the front-page story about how James Chanos — reportedly one of America’s most successful short-sellers, the man who bet that Enron was a fraud and made a fortune when that proved true and its stock collapsed — is now warning that China is “Dubai times 1,000 — or worse” and looking for ways to short that country’s economy before its bubbles burst. China’s markets may be full of bubbles ripe for a short-seller, and if Mr. Chanos can find a way to make money...

The approach of the new year might be an appropriate time to summarize what I have learned in researching the several books and articles that I have written this decade. That I came to own -- or even break -- many of the stories involved, although satisfying to me, should appall any ordinary citizen. These stories were too big for a responsible media to miss.  They became mine as a result of what I call the "ABETTO Syndrome."  For at least the last generation, the left in general, and the media in particular, have been turning A Blind Eye To...

It is becoming increasingly clear that in western society the inmates are running the asylum. The idiot elite that holds power in most western nations have demonstrated their insanity by accepting the outright lie that the essential atmospheric gas carbon dioxide is a undesirable pollutant that needs to be regulated. The scam begun by the crooked Enron corporation in the 1990's falsely claims that very slight increases in CO2 would substantially raise air temperatures. Enron, and its successors, hoped to profit from trading carbon credits like it had profited from trading credits in sulfur dioxide, a byproduct of coal combustion....

There are three levels of resistance that I have to the massive fraud that is Global Warming/Climate Change. 1st--the intent of the proponents. There were some occasional reports and studies published, and some discussion among the scholarly community, but the political and corporate involvement in the man-caused global warming discussion started 1990-1992-ish. The first major "legitimate" non-environmental-science-agenda-driven-pony-tailed-professor actors that started pushing and massively funding the global warming crap were General Electric and Enron. It just turns out that Enron was the largest provider of solar cell panels in the world, and G.E. was the largest supplier of wind turbines. So...

“If there is one thing I have been impressed with over the last decades, it is that when the environmental community defines a number one priority, something happens. Not always something good—but something.”1 Dr. Kenneth L. Lay, Chairman, Enron Corporation, June 1997 (1) Who was the late Ken Lay, the architect and chairman of Enron throughout its 16-year history? All parties to the current legislative debate on a CO2 cap-and-trade bill should know. After all, Lay’s tireless efforts to promote CO2 regulation and enact renewable energy quotas make him a father figure for HR 2354, the Waxman-Markey climate bill, what...

Backing Gas Ken Lay’s political niche began innocently enough with a unique, highly focused natural gas strategy, one that would culminate in Enron’s 1995 self-description as “the world’s first natural gas major.” In pursuit of that goal, Lay promoted gas-fired power generation relative to coal. He countered the coal lobby’s contention that the 1970s shortages were the inevitable result of a tiring North American gas resource base. “We had a surplus of regulation, not a shortage of gas,” Lay would say, and Enron backed up its claim by offering utilities long-term fixed-priced gas contracts. Enron also challenged the tendency of...

First, there were those infamous hacked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Now, a mere seven days before the Copenhagen Conference on climate change, this breaking news story takes the breath away. The whole ‘global warming’ shambles is falling apart. Today, The Copenhagen Post declares: “Denmark Rife With CO2 Fraud”: “Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper. Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in...

Warming Scandal: The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning. As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard. The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd...

Enron executives worked closely with the Clinton administration to secure support for the Kyoto Protocol because the company believed the treaty could provide it with a financial windfall. An internal Enron memo circulated immediately after the 1997 Kyoto meeting - and first reported by The Washington Post - shows the company believed the treaty "would do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States." So Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental groups that support international energy controls to reduce...