--- Begin Message ---
Al Giordano's forwarding of an article from the Washington Post this morning
re Bill Paxon of Aiken Gump's respresentation of Enron, inspires some Xmas
thoughts before heading over to Jane and Billy's for Xmas Country Breakfast
replete with home grown Hickory Valley sausage and bountiful goodies.
============================================================================
=================
I believe that:
1. Bill Tyree and his network is right. The essential primary purpose that
keeps HUD going is that it serves as a slush fund to support narcotics
trafficking ---and the related domestic covert operation ---in the US. It is
my contention that this narcotic trafficking is critical to supporting the
place based covert operations that help this network control government
resources and financial fraud in the US.
2. If you look at the kind of people who are continually used to front for
HUD's social purposes and the way the resources have been used, Tyree's
allegations make infinitely more sense. (see the latest)
3. In April of 1997, Bill Crist, President of Cal Pers, the largest pension
fund in the country, warned me that "they have given up on the US. They are
planning on moving all the money out of the country starting in the fall."
Indeed, that is when we and the rest of the honest people and contractors
were thrown out of HUD and the missing money started to go missing.
4. This appears to be the same time that Enron started to balloon in volume.
I believe that Enron was used to launder some of the missing money that was
being pulled out of HUD and other federal operations, particularly the
federal credit programs like FHA-HUD, where Chase-Morgan and the other
members of the NY Fed (US Treasury's depository)
5. I believe that Harvard's presence at HUD, as Lockheed, DynCorp, AMS and
Chase-Morgan, and at Enron is explained by the critical roles they play in
narcotics trafficking and covert operations geared for place based control
of government resource and financial fraud.
6. I recorded six cassettes of my experiences at HUD during the first Bush
Administration which are referred to as the Kemp tapes as well as two
cassettes that describe my experience with Harvard's HUD representatives, as
well as a tape of the Boston speech that allegedly so upset Harvard. If
anyone is interested in copies to help corroborate my reasons for believing
that #1-5 is so, please let me know and I will send you copies. In these
tapes is a somewhat edited version of the incidents surrounding Kemp's
unusual behavior when the Washington Times Franklin Cover Up pedophilia ring
stories started to run and why I believe that Kemp was a pedophilia and why
such "control files" are so critical to facilitating the type and scale of
financial fraud we are dealing with.
7. Jerry Hawke and Herbert Winokur are not on the lists below for HUD and
Enron, but they are critical players. Jerry Hawke's son, Dan, who spent five
years targeted us and all the honest people at HUD as Ervin's attorney,
destroying all the internal financial controls so that stealing all the
missing money became possible, now works at SEC enforcement. No doubt the
Enron group with need the kind of good insider information about sensitive
government decisions that folks like Conrad Egan supplied from HUD. After
all, not all insider information can be provided by PROMIS. Some requires
planting your people inside.
============================================================================
========
Re: Members of the Millennium Housing Commission
See article on Bill Paxon's representation of Enron forwarded by Narco News
this am.
Bill Paxon lived next door to Carolyn Betts who had worked at Hamilton and
stayed on with Ozzie Blake to help shut down the company and manage all the
investigations, audits and litigation.
Bill Paxon's wife is Susan Molinari, whose father was a Congressman from NY
and who also became a Congressman from NY. Susan is co-chair of the
Millennial Housing Commission with Richard Ravitch.
Ravitch has the lead quote on my article, The Rule of The Myth of Law...."If
I can get government subsidies, what do I care if people have educations or
jobs" which was said to me as we had dinner at the jockey club in DC after
Dick had attended a reception for the president of the AFL-CIO as Chairman
of the AFL-CIO Housing Trust.
John Weicher, a member of the Commission, was at the Hudson Institute and is
now Assistant Secretary of Housing. The Hudson Institute is where the author
of the IBD editorial proposing more WOD is from. Weicher is now the
Assistant Secretary of Housing at HUD. He was the Assistant Secretary of
Policy, Development and Research when I was at HUD. Of the many wonderful
stories I have of Weicher, one is the time he tried to persuade the Price
Waterhouse partner to take a secret tape recorded into a meeting with Senate
staff. They had requested a meeting with Price as actuarial study experts
without Weicher or HUD staff as they considered them untrustworthy.
According to Tom Crarren, the Price Partner, Weicher wanted a tape recorder
secretly in the meeting so he could know what was said. Tom refused.
Conrad Egan was the special assistant to the Deputy Assistant Secretary for
Multifamily who had worked for Harvard's company and spent his time at HUD
giving Harvard's consultants inside information about what was going on. He
did not seem to realize or care that was he was doing was illegal. He had
been a senior executive at Harvard's HUD company, NHP, and may still have
had stock at the time.
Kent Colton was the Executive Director of the Homebuilders at the time that
he and the President came over to tell me that the Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Single Family was not to be chosen by us and report to me; he
was to be chosen by them and report to them. Hence, Ronnie Rosenfeld, the
current President of Ginnie Mae, was unacceptable. I am told that the
Homebuilders were a critical part of helping to get Hamilton destroyed. The
chairman of their industry group for Multifamily during 95-96, was the head
of Harvard's company, NHP. After our insurance company refused to pay our
attorneys, they dropped and the insurance company put in a new attorney. He
has since gotten a tremendous amount of business from several of the top
homebuilders on the East Coast. Kent got a job at Harvard after he retired
from the National Association of the Homebuilders. Ditto the last two
Assistant Secretary's of Housing, one of whom had come from Harvard.
Bart Harvey is also on the Commission. After Hamilton was destroyed I had
lunch with the chief attorney, David Horn, for the Chairman of the House
Authorizing committee, Rick Lazio. Horn told me that they would not support
any for profit investment in private equity in communities. All resources
were to flow in a not-for profit model through LISC and Enterprise,
generating corporate tax credits. What that meant was that poor folks were
not allowed to build equity or to learn how to control and manage and lead
private market development in their communities. Their learning would be
under the strict control of the corporate centralized capital and payrolls
of LISC and Enterprise. This model is essential to keeping these
neighborhoods to be "drug full zones."
There is a member of the commission from the Heritage Foundation. On the
Kemp tapes it tells the story of Burt Pines of the Heritage Foundation
explaining why we should announce grants for Harlem, but make sure that they
never get implemented. The headlines are to persuade "white women in
Westchester" that we care, but once you get the headlines there is no need
to pay over the money or really do anything. The implication was that white
women...and everyone else...only judged things according to what you said
and not what you did. So there needed to be absolutely no connection between
policy and "the real deal" as the political process had become completly
divorced from accountability.
Other members of the commission have associations with Harvard.
=============================================================
Millennial Housing Commission
Conrad Egan, Executive Director
The Honorable Susan Molinari, Co-chairperson
Richard Ravitch, Co-chairperson
Joseph Lynch, Commissioner, New York State Division of Housing and
Community Renewal
Barton Harvey, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The Enterprise
Foundation
Kent W. Colton, Senior Scholar, Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard
University
Cathy Bessant, President, Consumer Real Estate and Comm. Dev. Banking, Bank
of America
The Honorable Feather O. Houstoun, Secretary of Public Welfare, Commonwealth
of PA
Tom Bozutto, Bozutto Developers
Herb Collin, Chairman, Boston Capital
David Stanley, Director, National Equity Fund, Corporation for Supportive
Housing, LISC
William H. Hudnut III, Senior Resident Fellow, Urban Land Institute
Dave Carley, President, Carley Capital Groups
Ophelia B. Basgal, Executive Director, Housing Authorities of Alameda County
and Dublin, CA
Dennis Penman, Executive Vice President of M.J. Peterson Real Estate
Dan Fauske, Executive Directo, Alaska Housing Finance Corporation
Jeffrey Burum, Executive Director, National Housing Development Corporation
Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow, The Heritage Foundation
Renee Glover, Executive Director, Atlanta Housing Authority
John C. Weicher, Director, Urban Policy Studies, Hudson Institute
H. Lewis Kellom, Homes in Partnership & President, National Rural Housing
Coalition
Samuel Moseley, Mediator/Attorney, Former Regional Administrator of HUD
Cushing Dolbeare, Founder and Chair Emeritus, National Low Income Housing
Coalition
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2001 9:03 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: A washingtonpost.com article from [EMAIL PROTECTED]
You have been sent this message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] as a courtesy of
the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com).
This story from today's DC Post has this curious line, among others...
"Enron hired former New York representative Bill Paxon, a leading
conservative, to run Americans for Affordable Electricity, which
commissioned studies and recruited business support for deregulation."
Paxon is now Akin Gump's top Republican lobbyist, the equivalent to Strauss
or Jordan but on the GOP side. What this article doesn't make clear is
whether his position with this Enron front group was before or after he
joined Akin Gump as a partner.
Al
To view the entire article, go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22448-2001Dec24.html
Campaign Gifts, Lobbying Built Enron's Power In Washington
By Dan Morgan and Juliet Eilperin
During the administration of the first President George Bush, a new party
fundraiser named Kenneth L. Lay was invited to spend the night at the White
House. The sleepover was an early coup for the chairman of Enron Corp. and a
harbinger of things to come.
Over the following decade, Lay and Enron poured millions of dollars into
U.S. politics, cultivating unequaled access and using the entree to lobby
Congress, the White House and regulatory agencies for action that was
critical to the energy company's spectacular growth.
Now, with Enron's sudden bankruptcy, public attention has turned not only to
the financial practices that brought the company down, but to what its
far-flung political operations say about the country's campaign finance
system.
Some Democrats in Congress are spoiling for an opportunity to use Lay and
Enron to embarrass the Republican Party, which received most of the
company's largess over the years. They want to look into such things as
Enron's relationship with Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), ranking minority member on
the Senate Banking Committee and chairman of the committee at a time when
his wife, Wendy L. Gramm, was serving on Enron's board. Last year, Gramm's
committee approved legislation that included a key provision exempting parts
of Enron's massive energy trading operation from federal oversight.
"I think the Enron story is going to turn out to be an enormous political
story," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), ranking minority member on the
House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The ties of Lay to the White House and GOP leaders, he added, were so
multilayered that Republicans are likely to be reluctant to pursue them. But
he made clear that he intends to do so and expects the Democratic-controlled
Senate to follow suit.
Enron also cultivated relationships with Democrats, however. Lay played
golf in Vail, Colo., with President Bill Clinton, and Enron gave hundreds of
thousands of dollars to Democratic campaign committees and Democrats in the
House and Senate, including Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Rep. Martin
Frost (Tex.), the ranking minority member on the House Rules Committee.
<h1>A Routine Cost for Some</h1>
Advocates of campaign finance reform say the Enron case vividly illustrates
the ties between politics and big money, though it's unclear that the
company's political operations were radically different from others for whom
political contributions have become a routine cost of doing business.
"There are aspects of [the Enron case] that remind us of the savings and
loan scandal, in the sense that a powerful institution used big money to buy
influence and protect itself while ordinary citizens ended up losing their
life savings," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a Washington
interest group, referring to a banking controversy in the 1980s.
Enron's ties to Republicans and the present Bush administration were
especially close. Lay raised large sums for George W. Bush's campaign.
Enron, Lay and its employees have contributed $572,350 to him over his
career, far more than any other company, according to the Center for Public
Integrity in Washington.
Several top administration officials have been Enron advisers or
stockholders. Enron, Lay and other senior executives contributed $1.7
million in soft-money donations to politicians in the 2000 election cycle,
two-thirds of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics.
Republicans clearly are sensitive to the potential political dangers. The
National Republican Senatorial Committee recently returned a $100,000 check
collected from Enron in November, after deciding that "it was appropriate to
give it back," spokesman Dan Allen said. The Republican Governors
Association last week returned an Enron donation of $60,000.
What was unique about Enron, competitors and allies agree, was a brash and
sometimes counterproductive political style.
Stories of Enron's hardball style are legion. In October 1999, for example,
Jeffrey K. Skilling, then Enron's president, expressed his displeasure at
Rep. Joe Barton's position on a deregulation bill pending in the energy
subcommittee Barton chairs.
The meeting grew "heated and awful," said one person who was present, until
Barton (R-Tex.), a usually mild-mannered man who keeps a Bible on his desk,
exploded. "Jeffrey Skilling, I may not have your millions of dollars, but I
am not an idiot," one witness recalled Barton saying. The meeting ended
without Enron getting the changes it wanted.
"Skilling did not get Washington," the source added.
"In their lobbying, they acted like the 800-pound gorilla they were," said
Christopher Horner, a Washington lawyer who briefly directed Enron's
government relations in 1997.
Lay and Skilling declined interview requests, but Enron officials say they
have no regrets about their use of money. "It got us name recognition,"
company spokesman Mark Palmer said. "Given the aggregation of our foes, we
had to make sure that people knew what our argument was."
<h1>Jump-Starting Deregulation</h1>
Almost from its start in 1985 as a gas pipeline company, Enron needed help
in Washington, and it got it in a series of actions by Congress and the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that undermined the traditional
monopoly of utility companies over power plants and transmission lines.
Enron lobbied for several of the initial actions that set the stage for the
era of a deregulated wholesale electricity market.
It supported the 1992 Energy Policy Act, which opened the utility companies'
wires to electricity merchants such as Enron. It also worked with the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission -- then chaired by Wendy Gramm -- for a
regulatory exemption for futures trading in energy derivatives, which later
became Enron's most lucrative business. Soon after Gramm stepped down in
1993, she was appointed to Enron's board.
Independent sources knowledgeable about these dealings, however, said Enron
was not the main interested party. They said the lead was taken by several
major oil companies, including British Petroleum Co. and Phillips Petroleum
Co., which were concerned about the effect of CFTC regulation on their
offshore trading in crude oil contracts. Wendy Gramm, an apostle of free
markets, needed little convincing, the sources said.
That same year, Lay served as chairman of the committee organizing the
Republican National Convention in Houston. Hedging its bets, Enron made a
major contribution to a "street fair" in honor of Sen. John Breaux (D-La.),
a key energy policymaker, at the Democratic convention.
Key orders by FERC in 1996 also supported Enron's transformation into a
freewheeling trader of gas, electricity and more exotic products, such as
telecommunications services and sulfur-dioxide emissions credits.
The new rules ensured that Enron and other merchant companies could buy
electricity from independent power plants and sell it to distant customers,
using transmission lines borrowed from utility companies.
Even Enron's harshest critics credit Lay with putting new issues -- such as
electricity deregulation -- on the Washington agenda. Lay,a former Interior
Department official with a PhD in economics, became "the ambassador" for
deregulation, one former employee said.
Throughout the 1990s, Enron's agenda was opposed by coal-burning utilities,
especially ones in the Southeast, which viewed the emerging wholesale
electricity market as a threat to their turf. Many of these, such as
Atlanta-based Southern Co., had impressive political funding and connections
of their own.
But with the explosive growth of Enron and the GOP takeover of Congress in
1995, the company's soft-money donations -- unregulated and unlimited gifts
to political parties and organizations -- jumped sharply. They went from
about $136,000 in the 1993-94 election cycle, to $687,000 in 1996 and $1.7
million in 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
<h1>Frustrated by Washington</h1>
For all its connections, sources say, Enron often found Washington
frustratingly slowand unreliable.
The company placed a substantial bet on federal support for limits on the
greenhouse gases causing global warming. Enron officials hoped to exploit a
new market in industry for carbon-emissions credits, similar to the one that
developed for sulphur credits after clean-air legislation was enacted in
1990.
Lay joined the Union of Concerned Scientists and environmental groups in
calling for curbs on carbon in the atmosphere. The Clinton administration
was supportive, but this year the Bush administration reneged on a campaign
pledge to impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal-burning power
plants.
A multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign in Congress to secure legislation
requiring states to institute retail electricity deregulation fared even
worse.
Enron hired former New York representative Bill Paxon, a leading
conservative, to run Americans for Affordable Electricity, which
commissioned studies and recruited business support for deregulation. But
the legislation never made it out of a congressional subcommittee.
At the same time, Enron was growing restive over the slow pace of
deregulation in the wholesale electricity market, the core of its business.
Large parts of the country, especially the Southeast, were still monopolized
by regulated utilities that limited the opportunity for trading gas,
electricity and energy derivatives.
<h1>Political Pragmatism</h1>
Enron's political pragmatism was demonstrated in the 1998 New York Senate
election, when it dropped its support of the Republican incumbent, Alfonse
M. D'Amato, after Democrat Schumer endorsed Enron's goal of wholesale
deregulation, sources said. Lay reciprocated by hosting several fundraisers
for Schumer, and Enron's political action committee contributed $7,500 to
the Schumer campaign.
The company's lobbying team expanded along with its political spending. It
outgrew the two-person operation that existed in 1989 and began to reflect
Enron's interest in everything from pipeline safety and derivatives trading
to Overseas Private Investment Corp. loan guarantees.
By last year, its lobbying expenses exceeded $2 million a year and covered a
raft of big-name consultants, such as former Montana governor Marc F.
Racicot, the new Republican National Committee chairman, and former top
aides to House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) and House Majority
Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.)
The hazards of Enron's efforts to connect with both parties were evident
last year, when shortly before the November election, the company picked a
Clinton administration Treasury official, Linda Robertson, to run its
Washington office.
A perturbed DeLay, whose campaign and related funds had received more than
$100,000 from Enron and Lay, briefly "excommunicated" Enron, a House source
said. Robertson was not invited to a series of meetings of electricity
lobbyists held in DeLay's office last July, though an Enron official did
finally attend the sessions.
Enron had more success when Congress overwhelmingly approved legislation
last year containing a provision precluding the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission (CFTC) from regulating Enron's trading in energy derivatives.
These instruments are traded largely between electricity dealers and big
wholesale consumers, which use them to hedge against price swings that could
adversely affect their businesses.
The exemption, tucked into broader legislation that established the legality
of unregulated derivatives trading by banks, was not supported by a Clinton
administration working group, largely because of opposition from the CFTC.
Since the departure of Wendy Gramm, some in the agency had lobbied for
tighter control over the exploding energy derivatives market. The
legislation passed through the Senate Banking Committee, then chaired by
Phil Gramm, who has received $97,350 from Enron employees and its political
action committee since 1989. A Gramm spokesman said the senator does not
recall talking to his wife, an Enron director, about the energy provision
and played "no role" in negotiating it. Wendy Gramm did not return phone
calls seeking comment.
Enron was a primary player, with Koch Industries Inc., a large, privately
held oil and gas company based in Wichita, in pushing for the exemption, a
source said. But the company's main effort was focused on the House
Agriculture Committee, where the legislation originated. Its chairman and
ranking Democrat, Texas Reps. Larry Combest (R) and Charles W. Stenholm (D),
respectively, were among the top recipients of Enron campaign donations in
the House since 1989.
The CFTC objected strenuously to the initial draft marked up by the
committee, but the Texas congressmen helped work out a compromise between
Enron and the agency. The compromise was then offered by Rep. Jerry Moran
(R-Kan.), the home-state congressman of Koch Industries and a recipient of
campaign donations from Enron and Koch in the last election cycle. Moran did
not return a phone call seeking a comment.
Early this year, Lay seemed to be at the height of his political power,
getting a private meeting with Vice President Cheney to discuss the
administration's energy policy proposals and weighing in on key nominations
to FERC.
Curtis Hebert Jr., FERC's chairman at the time, has reported that Lay
called him and implied that Enron would urge the newly installed Bush
administration to keep him in the job -- if he changed his views to support
Enron's position for faster electricity deregulation. Lay contended that
Hebert called him to ask for support.
Hebert was not reappointed. He was replaced by Texas lawyer Pat Wood III, a
strong advocate of deregulation who had the backing of Lay and Enron.
Ironically, since Enron's fall, both FERC and Congress seem to be moving in
the direction of the deregulated markets Lay and Enron lobbyists had pushed
for.
--- End Message ---
