A friend sent this link, an article entitled “18 Tips For Reading People”. They used Bethany McLean as an example of “stress”. The caption reads: When a person leans with their torso away from you, this can mean that the person is going through a moment of stress
She’s stressed because she’s lying.
Filed under Enron
International Business Times has an update for a Lawsuit The Has No End:
An Enron Corp successor seeking money for the energy giant’s creditors cannot rely on bankruptcy law to undo the company’s rushed sale of commercial paper just before its 2001 collapse.
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on Tuesday said funds that bought the debt were shielded by “safe harbor” laws that prevented Enron from categorizing their purchases as illegal conveyances.
These funds included two managed by a unit of ING Groep NV , and one by Mexico’s Alfa SAB .
Enron redeemed the commercial paper in the fall of 2001 to shore up its rapidly deteriorating liquidity, just weeks before its December 2 bankruptcy, the sixth-largest in U.S. history. Its successor, Enron Creditors Recovery Corp, still seeks money for the Houston-based company’s creditors.
Legal proceedings over the commercial paper, which is short-term debt that companies often issue to fund day-to-day operations, began in 2003.
Enron had prematurely redeemed about $1.1 billion of commercial paper at above-market prices. Its successor contended that the prices were excessive and resulted from coercion by noteholders, but the noteholders said the buyback was a strategic move by Enron to calm “irrational markets.”
While most of the nearly 200 buyers of the commercial have settled with Enron, ING and Alfa did not, saying safe-harbor provisions of U.S. bankruptcy law shielded their purchases from the reach of creditors.
In a 2-1 ruling, the Second Circuit said it became the first federal appeals court to extend the safe-harbor provision to cover early redemption of commercial paper.
“We see no reason to think that undoing Enron’s redemption payments, which involved over $1 billion and approximately 200 noteholders, would not also have a substantial and similarly negative effect on the financial markets,” Judge John Walker wrote for the appeals court majority.
A variety of regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, had filed briefs supporting the noteholders in the case.
Michael Cook, a partner at Schulte Roth & Zabel who represented Alfa, said he expects Enron will appeal.
Enron representatives could not be reached for comment.
Filed under Enron
Me: I just spoke to [deleted]. I asked her to overnite the checks. I’ll have them in the morning.
Big: Spend that money like a miser. Make it last as long as possible!
Me: I will be like Donald Duck’s uncle, Uncle Scrooge McDuck (I have no idea why they have similar but not identical last names. I suppose Uncle Scrooge came from Ireland. That’s as much as I know about the genealogy of the Duck/McDuck family.) Anyway, like Scrooge McDuck, I’ll just sit here and count my money all day, refusing to give orphans any porridge or blankets.
Big: Sounds perfect! Be as misery as Scrooge McDuck and as smart as Ludwig Von Drake.
Me: Why would Scrooge McDuck have a different name from Donald Duck? Maybe Donald’s Mom married a duck with the last name “Duck”?
I had to google Ludwig Von Drake.
Big: Perhaps the McDucks were a clan of Scottish ducks. The McDucks were anti-English, but got beat by the pro-English clans. The McDucks escaped to America. Scrooge, being too mean to be afraid, kept the McDuck name. But Donald’s father, being not as brave, dropped the “Mc” to camouflage his true clan affiliation.
Me: That is probably what happened. I actually believe that story.
So is Donald’s refusal to wear pants a protest against the English?
Big: Yes, it is a subtle, but largely ineffective, protest. He is not bold enough to wear kilts, but just goes bare-assed instead.
Me: LOL! I haven’t laughed like this in *days*! THANK YOU for that!! I love you. I actually have tears in my eyes from cracking up at that. You’re such a dork. : )
May I post this on my blog? It’s too good not to share.
Big: You can post it, but I don’t know why you are laughing. I’m pretty sure that what I am telling you is accurate. : )
Filed under Enron
Mark Steyn is one of my favorite writers; he’s very British in his communication, which I always enjoy. Naturally I was quite interested in his comments about Conrad Black, in which he mentioned Enron:
As to white-collar crime, what about the one type of white-collar crime that goes entirely unpunished? For an accounting fraud of $567 million, Enron’s executives went to jail, and its head guy died there. For an accounting fraud ten times that size, the two Democrat hacks who headed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, walked away with a combined taxpayer-funded payout of $116.4 million. Fannie and Freddie are two of the largest businesses in America, but they’re exempt from SEC disclosure rules and Sarbanes-Oxley “corporate governance” burdens, and so in 2008, unlike Enron, WorldCom or any of the other reviled private-sector bogeymen, they came close to taking down the entire global economy.
Except for calling Enron a fraud, I agree wholeheartedly with Steyn’s comments. I’ve pointed out numerous times when the government claims the private sector is doing something that it is doing to a much greater degree (case in point: We Owe Andy Fastow A Huge Apology). It makes one think that perhaps the government is not being quite as consistent as it should be.
On the other hand, I had to roll my eyes at this comment left by someone calling himself “Tex Paine”:
CORRECTION: Enron founder and Chairman Ken Lay died of a heart attack before his conviction. CEO Jeff Skilling is still in prison, though his “honest services” conviction was also overturned.
The details, if anyone cares: Jeff Skilling resigned as CEO as Enron began cratering. Whereupon longtime CEO Ken Lay became CEO again. So, technically, Lay was CEO when he died. But he’d become a figurehead for Skilling. See The Smartest Guys in the Room.
Or how about you read the court transcripts, the 10ks, 8ks, and analyst comments? How about you look for yourself what the statements said? How about you watch the analyst video?
Seriously? Smartest Guys In The Room? This is America. We can do better than Smartest Guys In the Room.
Filed under Enron
June 27, 2002, the Enron Task Force announced they had charged Gary Mulgrew, David Bermingham and Giles Darby with wire fraud against their employer, Greenwich NatWest, in a series of deals involving an investment in a partnership formed by Enron CFO Andy Fastow.
The Southampton deal was odd for several reasons, the first being that when the NatWest Three realized there might be some irregularities involving Fastow, they reported themselves to British authorities. If they were truly guilty, it makes one wonder why they were so eager to speak to the very people who could punish them.
Secondly, the guts of the accusation against them (that they vastly under-reported the value of an asset, urging Greenwich NatWest to sell at far below market value) was refuted by the so-called victim itself. NatWest said the asset was fairly appraised.
Third, the extradition process that would ensue for the NatWest Three would become a nightmare. The three British citizens, who worked for a London bank, would find themselves at the mercy of the post-9/11 weirdness that surrounded America’s attitude toward all foreigners, not just those carrying suicide belts but quite proper and ordinary citizens like the NatWest defendants. The US claimed authority to pluck three British citizens and deposit them in US courts. The NatWest Three pleaded to be tried in British Courts, which was where the supposed crime occurred, and where – not incidentally – witnesses and evidence of their innocence remained. But the US eventually won that battle, and the defendants were hauled before a Texas court where they were forced to plead guilty to an absurd crime and sent to American prisons, some five thousand miles from their families.
Filed under NatWest Three
Today I am out of bed.
I can’t tell you what a massive spiritual effort this is. I am physically ill. My whole body has swelled up like I just drowned in a pond. Everything has an echo; it sounds like I am the only person left in the universe. I try not to speak or be around anyone because the breath of other human beings seem to catch on some jagged edge of my brainpan and proceed to make me homicidally insane.
I started walking. I would walk and cry. I would head into the wind and just pull myself across the sidewalk in bipedal fashion because then my ill brain would be free to release suppressed memories, such as the song that was playing in a diner when I met a girl my age who ended up throwing herself in front of a train.
She was a nutcase, that girl. I remember thinking so at the time.
Aja. When all your dime dancing is through. I run to you.
It was better than the breath of other human beings, though, so I walked…oh, ten miles a day. Every day, with the wind battering my head.
Crying, because I was so fucking sick of the wind battering my head.
I had a notebook in which I had made hundreds and hundreds of squares. The squares were the hours I had survived without swallowing a bullet. For the first 179 I made an x, every hour, on the hour. I would wake up every morning with this voice in my head that informed me politely I was going to die anyway because the damage to my soul was extensive and irreversible. It showed me pictures of my blackened heart.
I woke up every morning at 6:30 AM to a preview trailer of my death, crying, because I could not fucking believe I could suddenly not sleep past seven.
What I did for a month, every breath in, every breath out, was try not to think about dying, and then I ran into a sudden horrible thought among the hundreds of squares.
I had four twenty page papers and four powerpoint presentations due in one month. I watched these due dates approach during the Good Morning Death Show. April 14th. April 28th. April 29th. May 1st.
April 14th. April 28th. April 29th. May 1st.
I ignored these dates for some time. I accessed my newly surfaced suppressed memories to reaqcuire the ability to knit. I clicked through lots and lots of blue yarn, crying, because nobody realized how important it was to me that they all shut the fuck up. I had no idea what I was knitting.
I think it might have been a noose.
If I am going to die, I have two options, I finally thought. I can either blow off the LSAT altogether and walk to California, right to the edge of the continent, and jump right off the goddamn world, or I can buy a pack of Marlboro Lights and write these fucking things.
I picked option two. I never was a risk-taker. Well, you see, I had to walk to California because I could not make myself sit and write hundreds of pages about shit I do not understand or care about. I would have to kill myself once I got there, I thought.
Who the hell wants to walk two thousand miles to die anyway? I can kill myself at home.
So lately, along with Securities Law and Intelligence Applications, I have been researching brain chemistry. Dopamine, Norepinephrine, Seratonin, and GABA, which is what homicidally insane people have too much of. Seratonin, it seems, is the drug of choice for those were born with hopelessly shitty emotional karma.
All deaths are horrible. *All*. And everybody gets one. Is taking your own life the worst, most miserable death possible? Good question, makes you wish the 2,300 people blown up in the WTC were still around to answer it.
Bad brains are bad brains, you can chew all the nicorette gum you want and improve your tennis game while you’re still breathing but chances are, you’re already fucked.
4.4 percent of the time, anyway.
You know, if you shoot heroin, you get an intervention. You get to write books about how important your pain is. You get your own room in a dandy rehab center, they give you medicine to block your withdrawal symptoms, calm your anxiety, soothe your diseased nerves. You get therapy once an hour.
Eventually there are movies about how important your pain is.
But if you just want to die for no reason that anyone else can understand people are just plain mean to you and they tell you right to your face they hope you fucking die for your stupidity.
If I had known what this was all about when I started feeling suicidal, I would have been much smarter about it and gotten myself hooked on meth. You know? And ended up on Oprah.
Filed under Uncategorized
This call, on January 22, 2001, covered earnings for the final quarter of 2000. It is hard to read the figures, knowing what will happen in just eleven months. Like a dagger to the heart, actually, is how it feels.
Filed under Enron
I like this email between Tim Belden and David Delainey because it sounds like Enron.
Filed under Enron
I tell this story every year. It’s a tradition for my birthday, which is June 15. And it has the horrible benefit of actually being true.
On June 15 of an undisclosed year, I turned 21 years old. Until that date, I had never had a single sip of alcohol (this seems crazy to me now, but Rice is not a party school and well, I was always a little bit of a goody two shoes.) Because it was my twenty-first birthday, my boyfriend promised a nice evening out with friends and because it was the first birthday I could legally drink, drinks would be had. The boyfriend promised he would take care of everything. All I had to do was show up, look pretty, and have a great evening.
After work, I drove to the salon where I got fabulized, did a quick round of shopping at the Galleria, and hurried home to get dressed. I had bought a short black dress with fringe on the hem, and new strappy black heels for the occasion. I looked pistol hot and was ready for fun. At 7pm, the boyfriend hadn’t shown up or called so I called him.
“I need ten more minutes,” he said.
I always tried to be a good girlfriend, so my instinct was to say no problem and chill out. I reapplied lipstick and fluffed my hair. By 7:30, there was still not a peep. I called him again. “Hey, what’s up? It’s my night, come on!”
“I’m still working,” he said. “I just need a few more minutes.”
I took a deep breath to cool my jets. It was still early. But I didn’t know what time reservations were, or what time my friends had been told to meet. It might be a situation where I could show up and go on with her celebration and wait for the boyfriend to show up. When I called him – again – at 9pm, he said he had forgotten to invite anyone. “So don’t worry about that.” But, he would be out of there soon. And he promised, he would call a few of them on the way home and they could still have the great evening. By this time, I was upset. It was my birthday. All my birthdays sucked, why did he have to make this one suck too? And he had forgotten to invite anyone? This was just bad; he had obviously forgotten or didn’t care that it was my birthday, and now that he knew, he wasn’t going to change his course. I was ticked, but still trying to salvage the situation.
Hours passed. By 11pm, I had succumbed to the birthday sobs. I called him nearly hysterical. “I only have an hour left of my birthday. Are you coming?”
“I can’t leave yet.”
At that moment, I felt utterly ridiculous in my fancy dress and expensive black strappy heels. I felt like it was symbolic of my whole life: that I was always waiting for things that would never come. For the party that would never happen. “What the fuck? Why can’t you just take me out to dinner, like you promised?” I hated the whine in my voice, but I also hated the fact that he could not be relied upon to even pretend he cared about my birthday.
“We’re still working.”
I hung up. I stood very still, hurting with rejection, trying to decide what to do. It was supposed to be a special birthday. Other people had nice birthdays, why couldn’t I? Why was it so goddamn much to ask that my goddamn boyfriend take me out to dinner on her goddamn twenty-first birthday? This was bullshit. That’s what this was. Bull. Shit. No fucking way.
Without considering the consequences or considering anything other than the fact that it was my birthday and goddamn it, that had to mean something, I jumped in the Porsche and screamed at 90 miles per hour up Memorial Drive to the Enron building, and into the Allen Center Garage. I spotted his car and parked beside it. I swiped my card and went up to the floor where I knew he was working.
There, surrounded by about fifteen other people, was the asshole boyfriend, deeply engaged in work.
I stood in the doorway, in my black fringe dress and strappy black heels, trembling with fury, a magenta shade of Pissed Off. The others looked up. He looked up when he realized the room had hushed. Energy shivered in the air, like the last three seconds before a bomb detonates in a very confined area.
“It’s my birthday,” I said, struggling to keep my voice level. I was looking at the asshole boyfriend, but everyone felt addressed. “Are you going to do anything?”
The asshole boyfriend did not know what to do. Pacify the crazy girlfriend – who actually had a legitimate claim on his time, since it was my birthday, or continue working? The others in the room had gone dead silent, staring at each other in embarrassed pain, trying to figure out just what the hell was happening.
The jerk boyfriend stood up and grabbed my upper arm like you’d grab the arm of a temper-tantrum throwing three year old, lifting me up to my tiptoes as he pulled me into the corridor. “Go home,” he growled. His rage was barely contained; the glitter in his eyes was like liquid death.
I burst into tears. “It’s my birthday.”
He walked back into the room.
I left the building and sat in her car and wept. It was now after midnight. My whole birthday had gone without any notice at all. Nobody cared. It was obvious to me now that I would not stay with him. If he’d only said he was working on something and couldn’t come home, I’d have gone out with my girlfriends and never given it another thought. But the fact that he specifically told me to let him handle it ensured that I didn’t even have that choice. Everything felt ruined: my birthday and the fact that the scales had been removed from my eyes about the asshole boyfriend.
I drove to a liquor store and bought, at random, some rum. “What do people drink with this?” I asked the clerk.
“Coke,” he said, so I bought a Coke.
At home, I mixed the coke and the rum. It smelled sweet, like something you’d have at a carnival. I took my first sip of alcohol. It was sweet and rich and golden. Barely tasted the alcohol at all.
I was trippin-balls drunk before the first one was finished. After the second one, I fell asleep on the sofa, still in my fringe dress and strappy sandals.
When the asshole boyfriend came home, he didn’t wake me. When he left in the morning, he didn’t wake me. I finally stirred around noon when somebody rang the doorbell.
I stumbled to the door to see a flower delivery person. He handed me two dozen long-stem red beauty roses. The card said, “Happy Birthday, from the team at Enron.”
They were the only ones who had acted with any grace and kindness – and I’m including myself in that statement. That was my only present or acknowledgement that year, and it was priceless. I left the boyfriend, but I still have the card somewhere.
Filed under Uncategorized
He picks out his suit the night before, deciding the gray or the blue or the other gray, and selecting a tie. He is surprisingly superstitious. He thinks gray gives him an edge, so usually he decides on the gray.
He is unshakeable. Things that would steamroller me, he handles with the same understated Teutonic efficiency as ordinary errands: action items on a to-do list. He does not freak out before court. He doesn’t miss breakfast due to a nervous tummy. He doesn’t frown or obsess or snap at me in frustration. He always tells me to be happy, do what must be done. His grandmother taught him these things. I had to learn them from him. Everything I know about keeping my cool came directly from observing and copying him.
When you see him on television, you see him with the same countenance he always wears in public: a relaxed, handsome, serious man, eyes straight ahead. His lawyer admonished him from speaking to the media, so he tends to just walk right by them, maybe smile dimly at the reporters he knows. This is actually not instinctive for him. He is a friendly guy. He likes to talk to people; he possesses a genuine curiosity about people. On television, you will see none of this. His face is blank. His thoughts are blank. You will see him walking with a swift, almost militaristic gait and you will imagine that he was a king in a past life. You will see for yourself why those who are loyal to him are loyal to the death: there is something magnetic and commanding about him. He is a man you can trust. A man you can trust with your life and wealth and heart.
The cameras grab at him even as he enters the courthouse. Through the glass, you will see him smiling, saying hello to the cop manning the x-ray scanner. You will see him empty his pockets, then walk through the magnetometer.
Then he will vanish as he walks outside the range of the robotic eyes.
When I watch, I feel anxious. I want it to be over. As long as he is out there, he belongs to everyone – he is a matter of public discourse. He has honestly never worried himself for even a minute about things they say, but I want to protect him. There are dimensions they will never know, gooey sweetness they will never even guess at. The transcendent white light of the camera can not reveal it.
Those things are mine and I count the minutes until he returns to the proper light of our life together.
Filed under Uncategorized
Well this is interesting – it has been a while since I heard any new crazy accusations against Enron. A CFO article states that:
Congress enacted Section 409A following published reports that Enron accelerated payment of unfunded retirement arrangements to its executives shortly before filing for bankruptcy.
First, I’d like to publicly marvel that if this article is to be believed, Congress is passing laws based on “published reports.” That’s scary enough. But the gist of the article is more interesting because it is total poppycock (where, for instance, is this reported?). I’ve never even heard this allegation until right this minute.
It is untrue. Enron didn’t have any “unfunded retirement arrangements”. Enron offered a 401(k) plan to employees. It matched contributions. It had no debt in this regard; every penny in the retirement accounts was there and accounted for, and if it wasn’t, we’d have heard about it on the news. This “unfunded liability” is simply a lie. Whether it originates from the CFO article or from some place that the author read it, it is irresponsible to publish it.
Secondly, none of the execs received accelerated retirement payments when the company went bankrupt. Some execs received retainment bonuses to – as the name implies – keep them when then company intended to reorganize around the pipeline business.
There were no other payments. None. The author of the article at CFO is irresponsible for spreading these lies.
Filed under Enron
I literally have about forty pages of these. I’m posting this one document, and as I post the others, I’ll update this one so they’ll all be found together. But I am just not in the mood to post all of them today in order. So this is one volume of proposed jury instructions.
Filed under Enron
The government filed this motion to ask that they be permitted to admit evidence that Ken Lay didn’t repay some loans as proof that he committed honest services fraud. Distilled to its essence, this motion is basically asking to admit irrelevant material to prejudice a jury. The government throws around the allegation that Dr. Lay failed to repay this loan – they don’t even bother mentioning an amount – while he was compensated $220 million as evidence of his “attitude toward his fiduciary responsibilities.”
I’ve searched all versions of the indictment and I can not find where they’re accusing him of having a bad attitude toward his responsibilities, and I’m pretty sure that its not illegal to have any particular “attitude” about one’s debts. So this is basically #prosecutionfail. Again.
Filed under Enron
Disclaimer: this post is not about Enron. It’s about capitalism in general but I thought it fit better over here than my other blog.
Today I got lost. This isn’t an unusual circumstance for me. I have no sense of spacial relationships or direction (not good for flying either) and I have a weird Memento thing happening where I think I’ve seen something I have never seen before, or the opposite: I’ve never seen a place I’ve been a thousand times. So getting lost today was not unusual, but it did feel dangerous. I got lost in a part of town I had never seen before.
As I was trying to find a landmark to signal me home, I drove by a long, dilapidated building with a long overhang, which kept the sun off the forty people who were sleeping there in garbage. Literally garbage: big black garbage bags, filthy bedspreads, paper plates, beer cans. I live in a “pix or it didn’t happen” culture, so my first instinct was to grab my phone. But could not take a photo of them. It would have stripped them of whatever dignity they had left. So I drove on, but I was no longer grinding my teeth with frustration about getting lost. I was sort of transfixed by the desperate poverty that I saw around me. A tar paper shack – literally. I never knew they really existed.
Yet woven through the poverty, loft buildings were being erected. It was these lofts and the idea of regentrification that allowed me to think maybe one day this neighborhood would be okay. There were “good bones” for a neighborhood. For instance, the streets were luxuriously wide (though riddled with potholes – in this, the City of Houston is very egalitarian: they don’t fix the holes in River Oaks either.) There was very little graffiti; though I love graffiti, I took it to mean, in this instance, there were no gangs. There were few people out and about, other than the ones I saw sleeping in the filth. I took pictures of all this, but I refused to get out of the car:
Lofts on the left:
Guy working or sleeping, shopping basket visible:
Boarded up building, litter on the ground:
Ripe for graffiti, but none exists:
Wald sign. It made me feel gross looking at it but I’m not sure why:
Long, empty street:
Boarded up with fencing:
The only graffiti I saw:
So close yet so far away:
More lofts, with security gate and fencing:
I took this one because that taupe building on the right hand side is one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen. Seriously? No windows at all?
Serious razor wire. Keep. The. Fuck. OUT.
Downtown, Enron building to the far left:
That horrible Wald sign again:
Decay:
Building for lease (a good sign!) I liked it because it says “Holt Building, 1923″. Ancient times. I’m a sucker for history.
A guy from one of the lofts was walking his dog.
More decay. These huge, old buildings have such good bones, they’re so pretty. They need somebody to fix them up and either sell them as lofts or business buildings:
Garbage, near where I saw all the people talking and sleeping:
Boy pushing a shopping cart on a sidewalk that says “Trail Closed”. Not sure what trail they’re talking about or why it is closed.
Boarded up and deserted, with Enron building on the left:
This made me smile; it was a green shoot of hope:
Driving back toward town where they actually have traffic lights:
The places I took the pictures are right behind Enron Field:
Someone like Jeff Skilling or Rex Shelby could fix this neighborhood if they put their minds to it. It’s a huge project – but both Skilling and Shelby could handle it.
As I was driving around, I thought of something one Enron exec told me about prison. He said he felt so bad for the people there… that they came from poverty, some of them didn’t even have teeth.
I guess I never really thought it about it because I never really saw it. But I’ve seen it now. I maintain that the best way to fix it is to do what capitalists are already doing: build big loft buildings, try to start businesses, and hope for the best.
When I found my way home, I was hungry. I looked in the fridge and felt very, very privileged:
Filed under Uncategorized
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