Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Wednesday, 17 July 2013

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Rudd brings forward ETS—Enron’s Trading Scam

Kevin Rudd’s decision to fast-track the ETS (emissions trading scheme) locks Australia into the next big casino scam cooked up by multinational banks and hedge funds to loot the world economy.

This particular scam of emissions trading was pioneered by one of the most criminal corporations in history—Enron.

Enron was the world’s biggest energy company before it spectacularly imploded into bankruptcy in 2001, finally revealed for the criminal scam operation it was.

In the meantime, it had claimed billions in profits through outright fraud, by counting its borrowings as revenue—giving rise to the new term “Enron accounting”. Enron’s young punk traders had sadistically unleashed chaos, untold misery and even death on millions of people in California by ordering their power stations to turn off in the middle of heat waves, triggering waves of crippling blackouts, in order to sharply force up the spot price of electricity so they could boost their profits. And Enron had been the biggest financial contributor to George W. Bush’s campaigns for Texas governor and U.S. president, as well as Texas Senator Phil Gramm, whose wife Dr. Wendy Gramm was an Enron director.

The latter is particularly significant and relevant today, because it was Sen. Gramm who sponsored the U.S. law called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act 1933 that since the Great Depression had kept the banking system safe by separating commercial banks with deposits from Wall Street’s investment banks.

Gramm’s law allowed the predatory gamblers on Wall Street and in the City of London to siphon off the deposits of the American people for their speculation in toxic derivatives; the face value of derivatives contracts worldwide skyrocketed from around $100 trillion in 2000, to $1.4 quadrillion ($1,400 trillion) by the eruption of the GFC in 2008.

Enron was a pioneer and pace-setter in derivatives speculation. From 1988-1992, Dr Wendy Gramm had chaired the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Her last act as CFTC chair was to change the rules, at Enron’s request and without consulting her fellow commissioners, to narrow the definition of futures contracts, so that Enron’s energy futures and swaps were excluded from regulatory oversight. Within weeks she had joined the Enron board.

Having started out as a natural gas company which expanded by buying into pipelines and power stations, in the 1990s Enron increasingly moved into energy derivatives trading, so that by 1999, its revenue from actually supplying energy through its physical assets was roughly the same as its revenue from energy trading—$20 billion or so from each. After Phil Gramm repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999, Enron’s “revenue” from derivatives trading quadrupled in one year, from $20 billion to $80 billion.

Environmental hero

Enron’s skills in derivatives gaming enabled it to be the pioneer and pace-setter in emissions trading schemes, initially in such pollutants as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. To boost its profits from emissions trading, the notoriously anti-regulation Enron actively lobbied for tougher regulation of air pollution.

For the same reason Enron championed the global warming fraud: an Enron memo stated that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dixoide emissions “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.”

Enron won environmental awards from America’s Environmental Protection Agency. It participated in the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change, and was a board member of and major donor to the U.S. Nature Conservancy. An internal memo boasted that due to its support of the Kyoto Protocol, “Enron now has excellent credentials with many ‘green’ interests including Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC], German Watch…” The NRDC’s Ralph Cavanagh declared “on environmental stewardship, our experience is you can trust Enron.” (The NRDC went on to promote electricity deregulation in California, from which Enron did so much damage.)

Fight the criminal fraud with Glass-Steagall

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood said today, “Rudd’s Enron Trading Scam is simply another means for banks such as Malcolm Turnbull’s Goldman Sachs—which took over the mantle of leading emissions trader when Enron went bust—to pillage the economy and destroy people.

“We can defeat this if the population rise up and force the Parliament to enact a Glass-Steagall banking separation, which will cut off the derivatives fraudsters from their source of loot.

“The CEC is leading that fight, so join us.”

*The details on Enron cited in this release were sourced from Executive Intelligence Review magazine, the video documentary entitled “The Smartest Guys in the Room”, and the book “Power Play: the fight for control of the world’s electricity”, by Sharon Beder.

Click here for a free literature pack on Enron’s crimes, the fraud of carbon trading, and the urgent need for Glass-Steagall.

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