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by Peter A. Kirby
Contributor
August 2, 2012
from
ActivistPost Website
Facts lead me to speculate that
the chemtrails so often seen in our
skies are sprayed for financial gain.
Chemtrails are admittedly sprayed as
part of weather modification programs. There are two large financial
markets that rise and fall with the weather: the weather derivatives
market and the catastrophe reinsurance market.
Chemtrails may be sprayed as part of a
plan to manipulate the weather derivative and catastrophe
reinsurance markets.
Even though the catastrophe reinsurance market is much larger, the
focus of this article is the history of the weather derivatives
market because, while the history of the catastrophe reinsurance
market is murky (I may uncover more in time), lots of information
about the history of the weather derivatives market is available.
It is this way because Enron originated
the weather derivatives market. The fall of Enron was one of the
greatest corporate scandals in American history, so there has been
much already investigated and exposed.
When you're talking about the history of weather derivatives, you're
talking about Enron.
Enron
They developed the most widely used early trading platforms, they
were founding members of the leading industry association and were
counterparties in the first known domestic and international
transactions.
In their heyday, Enron received Fortune Magazine's award for 'Most
Innovative Company' six years in a row.
They gave their Enron Prize
for Distinguished Public Service to people like,
Traveling to such far-flung destinations as Kuwait and
China preaching the Enron gospel.
Stock analysts gushed over everything
Enron did. Enron could seemingly do no wrong.
The only problem was, Enron was cooking the books seven ways to
Sunday. When the S.H.T.F., Enron's stock tanked like World Trade
Center building 7 and eventually brought down one of the nation's
oldest and largest accounting firms, Arthur Andersen.
Although the company itself has long since been chopped up and sold
off, former Enron employees now populate many other financial market
trading establishments.
Enron Weather
The particular division known to buy and sell weather derivatives
was called 'Enron Weather.'
Enron Weather started as a small, but
promising bit of the company. By the time of Enron's demise in 2001,
Enron Weather had grown to a significant part of their business.
It is suggested that Enron CEO Jeff Skilling's brother, Tom
Skilling originally had the idea for weather derivatives.
Peter Fusaro and Ross Miller
write in their book What Went Wrong at Enron':
As temperatures spike upward in
summer and fall in winter, utilities also potentially needed a
hedge against the weather. Or so Enron thought - thanks to an
idea that some Enron sources say Jeff Skilling's brother Thomas,
a weatherman in Chicago, suggested.
Tom Skilling is the chief meteorologist
at WGN-TV in Chicago, Illinois.
Loren Fox, the author of
Enron: The Rise and Fall tells the story of
Enron Weather like this:
...weather derivatives came to be
championed by an employee working at the grassroots level and
seeing customers' daily needs.
John Sherriff, who at the time
managed gas trading for the western United States, began looking
at derivatives linked to the weather in late 1995, and Vincent
Kaminski's research group worked on the idea in 1996.
A gas trader named Lynda Clemmons
was very interested in the idea, based on her conversations with
executives at electric utilities that used coal-fired power
plants... In 1997, Enron handed off its weather derivatives
effort to Clemmons, who was only 27.
She began a one-person
weather-hedging department within ECT...
Fox continues:
...Clemmons built up Enron's weather
business so that it did 350 transactions (hedging up to $400
million in potential revenues) in 1998, turning its first profit
that year.
Enron initiated the weather derivatives
market in Europe as well.
According to scholar Samuel Randalls:
In the UK, the first weather
derivative deal was sold by Enron to Scottish Hydropower who, at
that time, 1998, were taking part in a government pilot scheme
for the privatization and deregulation of energy markets.
Enron's Oslo office became the base of
their European weather derivatives business.
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In 2000, Enron also introduced
weather derivatives in Australia; offering temperature-based
products for Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Osaka.
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In 2002, after the bankruptcy,
the Enron trading desk (including Enron Weather) was bought
by UBS Warburg.
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John Sherriff is now the owner
of Lake Tahoe Financial and other Sherriff family
businesses.
Mrs. Clemmons left Enron in 2000.
She took a number of her colleagues from
Enron's weather team and set up weather derivatives company Element
Reinsurance. After Enron, Lynda Clemmons also worked at,
According to her Linkedin profile, Mrs.
Clemmons is now an independent consultant.
A history of
corruption
The Enron financial market trading desk, just like the company
itself, had a history of corruption.
Back in 1987, the Enron trading
operations were called 'Enron Oil.' When questions about an Enron
account at New York's Apple Bank began surfacing, Enron management
turned a blind eye. Money was pouring into this questionable account
from a bank in the Channel Islands and flowing out to the account of
a man named Tom Mastroeni; the treasurer of Enron Oil.
Enron management explained away these money flows and this
questionable account as completely legal profit shifting.
Although Mastroeni produced doctored bank statements and admitted a cover-up,
Enron management didn't pursue the issue. Nobody involved was even
reprimanded. Revelations continued to come out, but Enron management
did nothing. Enron's accounting firm Arthur Andersen exhibited a
similar disinterest.
After management confirmed an official lack of responsible
oversight, Enron Oil traders ignored position limits and got
themselves in big trouble. Only then did Enron executives show
interest.
The authors of The Smartest Guys in the Room tell the story like
this:
For months, Borget [the CEO of Enron
Oil] had been betting that the price of oil was headed down, and
for months, the market had stubbornly gone against him.
As his losses had mounted, he had
continually doubled down, ratcheting up the bet in the hope of
recouping everything when prices ultimately turned in his
direction. Finally, Borget had dug a hole so deep - and so
potentially catastrophic - that there was virtually no hope of
ever recovering.
Enron brass was in a panic.
Enron was looking at a $1 billion loss;
enough to bankrupt the company. Management sent in some expert
traders who, over the course of a few weeks, managed to clear out
these positions with only a $140 million hit.
Enron had to tell people about this $140 million trading loss,
though. Enron's stock slid 30%. The blame game began. Ken Lay, the
affable Enron founder and CEO, denied any responsibility. News of
the scandal conveniently came out right after a big bank loan
approval.
The U.S. attorney's office charged Borget and Mastroeni with fraud
and personal income tax violations.
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In 1990, Borget pled guilty to
three felonies and was sentenced to a year in jail and and five
year's probation.
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Mastroeni pled guilty to two felonies.
He got a suspended sentence and two years probation.
Deregulation
Ken Lay helped his company make more money and created new
financial markets (such as the weather derivatives market) through
energy sector deregulation.
Deregulation created a situation where
Enron and others could more effectively manipulate and arbitrage
(specifically regulatory arbitrage) markets.
Let us refer to a feature article published by industry publication
Risk.net:
'Enron was the focal point of the
deregulation agenda,' says Jonathan Whitehead, who started with
Enron Europe in 1996 and was heading the liquefied natural gas
(LNG) business in Houston at the time of Enron's demise.
'It was the most vocal when
explaining to regulators and governments and customers the
benefits of deregulated markets. I don't think deregulation in
power and gas in Europe or the US would have come as far as it
has without Enron,' he says.
Pushing for deregulation was very much a
part of the company's strategy from the start.
'Ken Lay [chairman and chief
executive of Enron] was the visionary at the time as far as
seeing where deregulation could go and actually driving
deregulation,' says Mark Frevert, who worked at one of Enron's
predecessor companies, Houston Natural Gas, from 1984 and stayed
at Enron until it's demise.
The right
connections
Deregulation necessarily required help from the federal government.
To make it happen, Enron and Ken Lay
(who died in 2006) had the right federal connections in spades. Ken
Lay enlisted in the navy in 1968. His friend pulled some strings and
had him transferred to the Pentagon.
According to the authors of
The Smartest
Guys in the Room, Lay spent his time at the Pentagon,
"...conducting studies on the
military-procurement process. The work provided the basis for
his doctoral thesis on how defense spending affects the
economy."
As I have explained in earlier writings,
there is reason to believe that domestic
chemtrail spraying
operations and
weather modification activities are carried out by
our military. Ken Lay had many high-level military connections.
Mr. Lay had the right political- and specifically energy-related
political connections as well.
He worked in the Nixon administration as
a Federal Power Commission aide, then as deputy undersecretary of
energy in the Interior Department. As chairman and CEO of Enron, he
sat on the boards of Washington think tanks and often travelled to
Washington.
A revolving door existed between Enron and the federal government.
Enron executive Tom White left the company to join the Bush Jr.
administration as secretary of the army. Enron executive Herbert
'Pug' Winokur was Lay's old Pentagon friend.
Robert Zoellick (now head of the
World Bank) represented Enron, then the United States as Trade
Representative and later as Deputy Secretary of State.
According to the authors of The Smartest Guys in the Room:
In 1993, Lay added Wendy Gramm [to
the Enron board], who had just finished a stint as chairman of
the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and was
married to Texas Senator Phil Gramm.
It goes on:
Just after Wendy Gramm stepped down
from the CFTC, that agency approved an exemption that limited
the regulatory scrutiny of Enron's energy-derivatives trading
business, a process she had set in motion."
When Enron galloped into Europe, they
had an influential lord on their side.
Greg Palast
covers it like this:
The fact that a truly free market
[in electricity] didn't exist and cannot possibly work did not
stop Britain's woman in authority, Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, from adopting it.
It was more than free market
theories that convinced her. Whispering in her ear was one Lord
Wakeham, then merely 'John' Wakeham, Thatcher's energy minister.
Wakeham approved the first 'merchant' power station. It was
owned by a company created only in 1985 - Enron.
Lord Wakeham's decision meant that,
for the first time in any nation, an electricity plant owner,
namely Enron, could charge whatever the market could bear... or,
more accurately, could not bear.
It was this act in 1990 that
launched Enron as the deregulated international power trader.
Shortly thereafter, Enron named Wakeham to its board of
directors and placed him on Enron's audit and compliance
committee.
As I speculate, a scheme to manipulate
financial markets by modifying the weather would necessarily involve
intelligence agencies. According to the authors of
The Smartest Guys in the Room,
Enron had intelligence agency connections:
One of Enron's key advantages over
its competitors was information: it simply had more of it than
its competitors. It's physical assets provided information, of
course. And Enron didn't stop there. It employed CIA agents who
could find out anything about anyone.
In stead of tracking the weather on
the Weather Channel, the company had a meteorologist on staff.
He'd arrive at the office at 4:30 A.M., download data from a
satellite, and meet with the traders at 7:00 A.M. to share his
insights."
It continues:
By the late 1990s, these research
efforts were herded together into something called the
fundamentals group - fundies in trader parlance. The fundies
group produced intelligence reports and held morning
briefings..."
The Bush
family
Mr. Lay and Enron had many connections to the Bush family and their
cohorts.
President
George W. Bush (Bush Jr.)
lovingly called Ken Lay 'Kenny Boy.' Mr. Lay was also close to his
father, fellow Houstonian,
George H.W. Bush (Bush Sr.).
For example, in 1991, Bush Sr. offered Mr. Lay the position of
commerce secretary. Mr. Lay turned him down. He wanted to be
treasury secretary.
Greg Palast, in
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,
characterizes the Bush/Enron relationship like this:
But what about Pioneer Lay of Enron
Corp? His company, America's number one power speculator, was
also Dubya's number-one political career donor ($1.8 million to
Republicans during the 2000 presidential campaign).
Lay was personal advisor to Bush
during the post-election 'transition.' And his company held
secret meetings with the energy plan's drafters. Bush's
protecting electricity deregulation meant a big payday for Enron
- subsequent bankruptcy not withstanding - sending profits up
$87 million in the first quarter of Bush's reign.
Other Bushes were getting some, too.
Greg Palast
writes:
Two months after the bankruptcy,
Governor Jeb Bush of Florida traveled to the Texas home of
Enron's ex-president, Rich Kinder, to collect a stack of checks
totaling $2 million at the power pillager's $500-per-plate
fund-raising dinner.
There are a lot of workers in
Florida who will wish they had a chance to lick those plates,
because that's all that's left of the one-third of a billion
dollars Florida's state pension fund invested in Enron - three
times as much as any other of the fifty states.
Mr. Palast continues:
Governor Bush encouraged a scheme by
a company called Azurix to repipe the entire Southern Florida
water system with new reservoirs that would pump fresh water
into the swamps. From the view of expert hydrologists, such a
mega-project is a crackbrained and useless waste of gobs of
money.
As part of the deal, Azurix would be
handed the right to sell the reservoir's water to six million
Florida customers. Azurix was the wholly owned subsidiary of
Enron that had recently been kicked out of Buenos Aires.
Specializing in private equity buyouts,
The Carlyle Group is one of their
two main family businesses and one of the nation's largest defense
contractors. Chemtrail spraying is a military operation.
The Carlyle Group could help
geoengineering programs happen.
Participation in a scheme to defraud the population while murdering
them at the same time would probably be A-o.k. with the Bush family.
Bush family members exhibit recurring criminal behavior.
Forget about the Enron connections.
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Do you know about the Nazi
connections?
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Are you aware of the numerous
links to 9/11?
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Have you heard of the
connections to the attempted Reagan assassination or the
attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II?
Don't forget that little Iran-Contra
fiasco and the drug dealing, gun running and money laundering.
Yup, they're connected to that dirty,
dirty BCCI thing, too. Folks, these are just some of the things we
know about. When you see a few cockroaches, you can bet there are
hundreds more in the wall.
So, who funds the Bush family? The answer is a little investment
bank called Brown Brothers Harriman. Maybe you've heard of it.
Webster Tarpley and Anton
Chaitkin in their book
George Bush - The Unauthorized Biography describe the
situation like this:
For George Bush, Brown Brothers
Harriman was and remains the family firm in the deepest sense.
The formidable power of this bank and its ubiquitous network,
wielded by Senator Prescott Bush up through the time of his
death in 1972, and still active on George's behalf down to the
present day, is the single most important key to every step of
George's business, covert operations and political career.
And I'll go you one better.
Who owns Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH)?
That's a good question because they are a private company. You
cannot buy shares of BBH on any stock exchange. But, in fact, it
really doesn't matter who owns BBH because BBH (like all other big
banks) suckles at the teet of the United States Federal Reserve
Bank.
In order to get that fresh, uncirculated capital (which has more
value than the money which is already in circulation), Brown
Brothers Harriman acts upon the orders of the United States Federal
Reserve Bank. Sure, BBH has businesses that make money, but when
they start a new business such as weather derivatives, they act with
the approval of the Fed. I understand this may be a lot to swallow
for the uninitiated, but this is the way it works.
Read
The Creature from Jekyll Island by
G. Edward Griffin.
Who owns the Fed? Well, that's the power behind the throne. It is an
official secret, but I dare write the name of
N.M. Rothschild as represented
by the Bank of England.
In short,
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the Bush family
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Enron
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Ken Lay,
...had the right political, business,
intelligence and military connections necessary to facilitate the
scheme I outline.
Conclusions
Enron was a business laboratory directed by big banks.
In the new world of deregulation created
by the Bushes, Enron and others, the purpose of the company was to
throw things against the wall and see what stuck. Enron employees
were merely minions of those who controlled the purse strings.
Enron was the perfect environment in
which to try something new like weather derivatives. In light of the
histories of corruption exhibited by those involved, it is
understandable that the weather derivatives market they created may
have been part of yet another murderous rip-off.
While most financial market trading operations are seen as
unreliable, Enron's trading desk was often regarded as their most
productive and stable business.
Could this have been because they were
getting inside information about weather produced by geoengineering
activities? I don't know. I do know they had the ways and means
necessary.
Enron had motive and opportunity. Enron
benefited from weather derivatives.
Notes
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The Smartest Guys in the Room
book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, Penguin Books 2004
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'Weather as a Force Multiplier:
Owning the Weather 2025' report by the United States Air
Force 1996
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'The BCCI Affair' report by
Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown, 1992
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George Bush: the Unauthorized
Biography' book by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin,
Progressive Press 2004
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The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
book by Greg Palast, Penguin Books 2003
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Wall Street and the Rise of
Hitler book by Antony Sutton, Buccaneer Books 1976
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Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt
Eichenwald, Broadway Books 2005
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'Enron: Charting the Legacy 10
Years on' article by Risk.net 2011
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Enron annual report, 2000
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The Secrets of the Federal
Reserve book by Eustace Mullins, Bridger House Publishers,
Inc. 2009
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The Creature from Jekyll Island
book by G. Edward Griffin, American Media 2010
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Enron: The Rise and Fall book by
Loren Fox, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2003
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What Went Wrong at Enron:
Everyone's Guide to the Largest Bankruptcy in U.S. History
book by Peter C. Fusaro and Ross M. Miller, John Wiley &
Sons 2002
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'Weather, Finance and
Meteorology - forecasting and derivatives' by Samuel
Randalls School of Geography, Earth and Environmental
Sciences, University of Birmingham
Websites
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