Trader Tapes Excluded From Enron Trial

[annabanana]

We ought to be redistributing these tapes around the place.. everyone can understand what they're about. Anyone got them?

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-enron13jan13,1,2625960.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

From Associated Press and Bloomberg News
"The upcoming trial of Enron Corp. founder Kenneth L. Lay and former Chief Executive Jeffrey K. Skilling won't feature audiotapes of Enron traders discussing how they gamed California's power system for high profit when the state was plagued by rolling blackouts and skyrocketing power prices in 2000 and 2001, a judge ruled Thursday.

US District Judge Sim Lake sided with defense arguments that such inflammatory evidence had no place in the Jan. 30 trial because neither Lay nor Skilling was charged with illegal trading or market manipulation in California.

Skilling and Lay are charged with conspiring to hide Enron's wobbly financial condition in public statements and regulatory filings that painted the company as healthy. Prosecutors had argued that the manipulation of California's electricity market was part of that puzzle."

[question everything]

1. Beat me to it

I can still hear them saying "burn, baby, burn" and laughing.

I hope that these traders lost everything that they owned..

[acmavm]

3. And since I personally believe in an afterlife, I have no doubt that they

will be doing just that. To hurt you fellow man/woman/child like that for money and then laugh is almost unimaginable. But I've heard the tapes.

I hope their families disowned those miserable specimens of subhuman garbage.

[MADem]

5. And the insults about Grandma Millie

If there's any burning in hell to be done, I hope it's in THOSE guys' futures.

http://www.enrontapes.com/files.html The tapes are at this link. Start at the bottom and work your way up. Instructive, they are--shows you how miserable and evil people can actually be....

[Jose Diablo]

9. I doubt the traders lost everything they owned

They probably bailed on Enron and are now trading oil on the spot markets. Notice the gas prices at the pump? These guys probably are gouging and manipulating prices against the whole country/world for the oil companies now. Look at the oil companies profit these last few years.

California was just a trial run.

[napi21]

2. Can we assume everyone has seen at least one of these tapes?

I guess I can understand the judge's ruling, but don't you think most possible jurors will have already seen at least ONE of these tapes? Theu sire were in the media a lot when they were first discovered!

[annabanana]

4. They were just audio, I think...

I'd love to get a copy of them...

[MADem]

6. Link at post 5--n/t

[napi21]

7. Yes they were just audio, but I heard the replay MANY times

on TV. There were even transcripts in my local paper, and I live in Ga! Certainly NO RW area!

[rusty charly]

8. "The Smartest Guys in the Room"

In one of the film's most striking scenes, Gibney juxtaposes images of car crashes caused by malfunctioning traffic lights in California (during rolling blackouts that were orchestrated, in part, by Enron traders who were exporting power out of the state) with audiotapes of the traders telling jokes and footage of the famous experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram in which he told his subjects to administer electric shocks of increasing intensity to "learners." In some cases, Milgram's subjects were even willing to administer supposedly lethal shocks of electricity.

"I wanted to give a sense that as a Milgram subject hits the button, he's making cars crash in California," Gibney says. "Given the right circumstance, people can do horrible things."

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12179

[rucky]

10. The CRIME is inflammatory, not the evidence

fer chrissakes. I'm moving to Iraq where they have fair trials.