Anna Eshoo: “Madam Chairman, there is a simple fact here: crimes were committed. At this point, 10 Enron executives have gone to…”

“Madam Chairman, there is a simple fact here: crimes were committed. At this point, 10 Enron executives have gone to jail. They defrauded the ratepaying public, the businesses, the homeowners, the factories of the Western United States, and illegally extorted money from them by manipulating the market. Now, there is a lot of reconstructive history going on here today. The Clinton administration did impose price caps, actually. It was the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, led by Pat Wood of Texas, under the leadership of George Bush of Texas and Dick Cheney of Texas, now Wyoming, who refused to take any action, said that these were merely market forces at work. Dick Cheney said at a meeting that I was in that unless we built one 500-megawatt plant a week for the next 15 years, this would continue. Well, of course, he was pretty famously wrong. It was market manipulation. People have now gone to jail. We have crimes. But what we do not have is restitution. The law must be changed.”