January 14, 2009 question

The Wall-Street all-stars after the Enron meltdown in 2001 were none other than the bad boys of Enron. The blessings they bestowed upon the California energy landscape have since been passed on to the entire gas-guzzling community. If you want to get irritated, as Heather M (the M stands for Make Mine A Double), Steve T (the T stands for Tap's Open), Trevor, Karen H (the H stands for Hold The Barbecue And The Chicken On That Jack Daniel's Barbecue Chicken), and Karen M (the M stands for Maybe I Should Drive) probably were when they recalled the answer on Monday, check out this quote from former Enron exec Kenneth Lay, before he was convicted of being Lex Luthor:

"The broader goal of [Krugman's] latest attack on Enron appears to be to discredit the free-market system, a system that entrusts people to make choices and enjoy the fruits of their labor, skill, intellect and heart. He would apparently rely on a system of monopolies controlled or sponsored by government to make choices for people. We disagree, finding ourselves less trusting of the integrity and good faith of such institutions and their leaders.

"The example Mr. Krugman cites of 'financialization' run amok (the electricity market in California) is the product of exactly his kind of system, with active government intervention at every step. Indeed, the only winners in the California fiasco were the government-owned utilities of Los Angeles, the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. The disaster that squandered the wealth of California was born of regulation by the few, not by markets of the many."

The tactics in question boiled down to a bit of legislation that allowed Enron to inflate prices of everything under the shroud of what became known as Investor-Satan privilege, a law that expressly forbids the government from investigating the terms of any agreements between futures & commodity traders and the Lord of Darkness.

Can you tell the frigid snow storm is making me irritable? Here's today's question:

True or False (see, I'm feeling irritable, but generous): Pepto-Bismal contains a radioactive ingredient.