Jim Baird: “I want to underscore exactly what you said and how prescient and remarkably so that the individual cited in the…”

“I want to underscore exactly what you said and how prescient and remarkably so that the individual cited in the recording said, ``I'm betting on a $1,000 per megawatt cap'' because that is exactly the cap that was proposed. Let us put that cap into context. Again, the average cost before this crisis was $30 a megawatt hour. So the cap on $1,000 is a 30-fold increase. A 30-fold increase if applied to gasoline would be over $75 a gallon today. $75 a gallon. Not a tankful but a gallon. That is the kind of cap they were talking about. How remarkable. And I do not think it really is remarkable that they would speculate on precisely the cap that was put in. Let me line this trail of evidence further. The Vice President of the United States has claimed executive privilege and has denied this Congress and the American people access to the names of the people with whom he consulted in crafting his energy bill. How is it that Enron traders would so accurately predict the level of the cap that would be put on in the energy bill? How did they know that? And how coincidental that the Vice President of the United States will not give us the list of those names. He is consulting with the very people who are manipulating the energy markets at the very time they are doing the manipulation and he is refusing to do anything to stop that manipulation.”