Joe Allbaugh, his wife... and the California energy crisis

Company With Ties To VP Cheney's Energy Task Force Faces Criminal Indictment For Gaming California Electricity Market

Three years ago, while California’s energy crisis was spiraling out of control, Vice President Dick Cheney secretly met with half-dozen corporate executives of the country’s largest energy companies to hammer out a national energy policy for President George W. Bush. Cheney appeared on a number of news programs in May 2001 to promote his new energy policy, which turned out to be a boon for the energy industries, but abandoned consumers and environmental groups. Naturally, during some of those interviews, Cheney was asked whether a handful of the energy companies that sold electricity in California and stood to benefit financially from the new policy were behaving like a “cartel” and manipulating prices in the state’s deregulated electricity market. ---cont "Reliant, TXU and Entergy each paid Diane Allbaugh $20,000 for consulting work during the last three months of 2000, according to her January 2001 financial disclosure report. It's unclear whether she lobbied the energy task force on behalf of Reliant, TXU and Entergy, which would have certainly been a conflict-on-interest (sic), but her husband, Joe Allbaugh, "has participated in task force talks with a direct bearing on the energy companies' interests generally, such as environmental rules for power plants and electricity deregulation--a specialty of his wife's," the Times reported. " Where is Joe Allbaugh?