The anti-competitive practices of ENRON and others should have voided long-term contracts arrived at during the period in which they were manipulating the market. If, in any sense a contract can be said to be arrived at through illegal action by one of the parties it should be void without recourse. That is a principle of contract law that is often upheld in the courts of this nation, but its soundness as a principle of law is being defaced in this case because ENRON is in bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is a Never, Never Land of arcane judicial powers and seemingly unlimited opportunity for those who committed illegal acts to profit from them. ENRON, a company that committed a whole class of new crimes against employees, investors, suppliers and purchasers alike is being kept alive after its apparent death, and draining its victims all the time. This is being done in the name of relief for the creditors, many of whom were complicitous in the behaviors that led to its demise. There is something dramatically wrong with a system that rewards illegal acts by enforcing contracts that were arrived at through the illegitimate power in the market derived from those acts.

When a system of business law rewards the perpetrators of illegal acts with vast fortunes, as is the case in regard to ENRON executives, it is broken. When the law rewards companies that commit any illegal acts, whatsoever, it is badly diminished in effectiveness. When those acts devastate the economies of whole states through contracts that continue to accrue to the company's benefit in spite of their basis being founded in those illegal acts the law is worse than wrong. In those cases the law supports the criminal and punishes the victim of their crime. Such laws need to be changed if our system of commerce is to survive and thrive.

I am reminded of conventional behavior in schools by bullies that charge lunch money for protection against their bullying. Most of them have a collector who gathers the money for them, they never do it themselves because that exposes them. ENRON is reducing our regulatory agencies and our courts to the role of collector for the bully. They are following the letter of the law without recognizing its spirit and all parties involved in this shakedown of consumers are wrong. This indictment includes the States and the Federal agencies involved. It includes the perpetrators and even the companies that accepted those contracts in the first place. It leaves out the consumer but they are complicitous too in not watching out for their own interest more effectively.

Our energy industry in this nation is broken and the rising prices of energy are forming a tidal wave of costs that could easily subsume the American Dream. The Energy bill making its way through Congress is a pork laden fraud that will cause more problems that it will solve. We are at war in the Middle East because of our insatiable thirst for oil. We have fooled ourselves into thinking that dependence on foreign oil is not a strategic folly. We are proceeding down this path of energy dependence related to natural gas at a time when its failure in regard to oil is obvious. We are led by men who buy the idea that oil and gas should form the center of our energy supply for the foreseeable future regardless of how vulnerable that idea makes our lives and our economy to disruption. Our courts and regulatory agencies are abandoning sound policies that keep free markets working everywhere. This is the real crisis, it is not really one of supply. This crisis is one of cupidity, stupidity and rapacity by suppliers, traders and their sycophants in government. God bless and keep you all safe in these days of the living dead pirates of energy.