The Enron building and the Transco Tower are my two favorite buildings in Houston. I’ve taken lots of photos of both. These are some of the Enron building. I chose these because, in my opinion, it isn’t immediately obvious what makes them special.
The beautiful towers sustained damage after Hurricane Ike.
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Mennen speed stick, LOL.
The first time I ever went to Houston on business was in the early 1980s. Those were the days when it was lots of fun to threaten to keep the Yankees cold and in the dark. Anyways, I remember a meeting at Transco’s huge auditiorium. A poor city mouse saw how life at Transco was extremely good, what with the waterfall, the searchlight and the boss’ artwork , worth hundreds of millions hanging in the lobby. Well,Transco fed us the best steaks available and put us up in the Westin Oaks, and oh, my, wasn’t the ice rink at the Galleria just wonderful, and whoever heard of a Mens’ Club before?
Yes, after seeing all that, Transco tells us that they have no choice, business is bad, they are hurting and need to raise the merchant rates on natural gas. That’s when all the Yanks got together and slapped the crap outta take or pay and minimum bill, and found that the pipes were paying the producers huge premiums for product that was way in excess of pipeline capacity.
Years later, the Transco boss asked me why we kicked the crap outta him back then. I simply told him that he shoulda held the meeting at a Holiday Inn in Bostrop instead of the Transco Tower and we Yanks would never had been the wiser!
Just sayin’ that the fact is, the natural gas business was the best kept secret for all of us in the industry until Enron lost it for all of us. IOWs, had Enron not been so, lets say, “entrepreneurial to excess”, thousands of Enron employees (and other companies’ employees) would be still working and the retirees would be sayin’ “Its 5 o’clock, someplace!”
@Joseph — The thing about being “entrepreneurial to excess” is that it is not criminal in the USA — or at least it wasn’t before the Feds decided to make it so at Enron.
No, not criminal at all. Just sayin’ that the smartest guys in the room, somehow, yes, somehow by their actions or errors of omission, caused the collapse of a great company (Enron) and left thousands of employees both heartbroken (maybe our dear blogger is one?) and financially ruined along with thousands or more investors who did not understand what the boys were doing, but drank the Kool-aid and believed in the their wordss even as the stock price sank lower and lower…even as a executive(s) (in the “know”, who did, indeed, “get it”) in the process of selling stock out, still urged the employees to keep buying. Just sayin’
I wonder if Jonny Corzine is sayin’ what he did is not criminal? And wasn’t Jonny Corzine one of Obama’s top financial advisors just as Kenny was one of Bush II’s close advisor?
History, indeed, repeats itself.
I recently learned that the new Congressman, Runyan, from New Jersey wrote a letter to the NRC questioning the safety standards at the local nuclear plant. Apparenlty, the good Congressman found that every time the nuke plant could not meet exisiting safety standards, it went to the industry, which then lobbied Congress and the NRC, and lo and behold, each time, yes, each time, the safety standards were lowered to meet the lowered level of safety that the plant could meet. Interesting that this has been going on for years. An aging, leaking nuclear plant, today, has to meet safety standards that are only 50% of what the safety standards were when the plant was brand new. Of course, nothing criminal here, just “Move along, nothing to see here.”
Just sayin’….before the Linbergh case, kidnapping was not a federal crime…now it is….and eating meat on Friday got ya a place in hell, if you were Roman Catholc…of course, nowadays, its only hell if ya eat meet on Friday during Lent…wonder if all those souls in hell were all released at once when the rules were changed, LOL!