Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times: A Bubble That Enron Insiders and Outsiders Didn’t Want to Pop

What the world is now awakening to is that the Enron Corporation was not much of a company, but its executives made sure that it was one hell of a stock.

Here’s a link to the full text of Musharraf’s speech, courtesy of the New York Times. (A reader found the link and forwarded it to me.)

Joshua Michael Marshall asks an interesting question over at TPM. Is the retirement of Phil Gramm from the Senate related to the Enron scandal? His wife, as a member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, pushed through a regulatory exemption that benefitted Enron back in 1993 immediately before joining their board.

Andrew Leonard weighs in on the Enron scandal for Salon Premium:

There’s no doubt that a special prosecutor should be named. But will it make any difference? The real outrages committed here don’t fit well into a special prosecutor’s purview. The mutual embrace between the entire political system and Enron goes so deep that to ask whether the government could have (or should have) prevented Enron’s collapse is pointless. Enron’s woes aren’t really a scandal at all — instead, they’re a magnifying glass allowing us to see clearly exactly how government and business operate today. You spend enough money on campaign contributions and lobbyists to buy influence and get the laws changed on your behalf, and then you sit back and count your stock options. Enron did it on a bigger scale than anybody else in recent memory, and ultimately, on a more incompetent scale than everybody else, but that doesn’t make it exceptional.

He gets at what I’ve been wondering about all along, which is whether or not any laws were broken by people in government. Given today’s realities, business and government can legally cozy up to a degree that obviates any need for actual law breaking.

They called Bill Clinton “President Bubba,” but I never heard of him fainting while swallowing a pretzel while watching a football game on TV. I’m just saying.

Ed Ward on Bob Wills, the inventor of Western swing.

Price of power is an article from The Observer that gives an overview of Enron’s political connections and the fraud that brought them low. The article is chock full of interesting details, you just have to wade through a lot of loaded terms and unsubstantiated insinuations (generally a good idea when you’re reading articles from The Guardian or The Observer).

Anybody have a link to the full transcript of Pervez Musharraf’s speech? Here are some highlights, but I can’t find the whole thing. The full text of India’s response is available.

How big is the Enron scandal going to be in the end? I’ve read a ton of stories I wanted to link to, but I’m not linking to any of them. Some highlights: Enron’s former CFO has hired David Boies to represent him. Seems like he made plenty of cash before the implosion, and sees himself as being in real trouble. The Democrats are bludgeoning President Bush with this scandal, but Enron doled out plenty of cash to both parties over the past few years. I guess when it comes to taking cash handouts, there’s plenty of bipartisan cooperation. Arthur Andersen is in real trouble because its auditors destroyed documents that people are now very interested in seeing. Some people are speculating that this could be the end of Andersen altogether. They doled out plenty of cash to politicians in both parties as well. The New York Times reports that 29 Enron insiders sold off 17.3 million shares of stock starting in 1999 and ending in mid-2001, worth a total of $1.1 billion.

Also worth paying attention to is the list of people who have recused themselves from the Enron investigation. So far we have the attorney general (and his chief of staff), the Texas state attorney general, and the entire US Attorney’s office in Houston. In the last article I linked to, we have the Texas state AG’s spokesperson saying that he won’t recuse himself. I guess he changed his mind.

Pakistan’s military dictator Pervez Musharraf gave a the speech of his life last night, in hopes of placating India without losing his job of Pakistan. He decried terrorism and intolerance, but continued to refuse to turn Pakistani citizens over to India and refused to end support for Muslims living in Kashmir in their insurgency against the Indian government. He did annouce that terrorism by Pakistanis at home or abroad would no longer be tolerated.