President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%↑
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd
(D) Adam Frisch
52%↑
48%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
60%
40%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
July 27, 2007 10:39 PM UTC
22 Comments
I’ve always been partial to the one about how Mountain Bell didn’t know how to run a business profitably, and he was going to show them how it was done.
If someone remembers the actual quote verbatim, it would warm the cockles of my heart to read it here.
As somebody who lives in rural Colorado where we can’t get Qwest to install phone service at all, my favorite Nacchio quote from 2000 is:
“There will be supercarriers emerging over the next few years. We will be one of them.”
Hmmm. Qwest stock is $8.90. Verizon is $42. AT&T is $39.
I guess he was referring to the USS Yorktown (sunk 1942 in the battle of Midway) or the USS Wasp (sunk in 1942 at the battle of Guadalcanal).
But when my parents retired and moved out of Colorado about ten years ago, my father called Qwest to tell them how thrilled he was that he could cancel his account with them and move somewhere with a different phone company. The reply of the manager on duty: “Oh, I’m sure we’ll be buying up the local phone service in Georgia soon enough.”
It is ironic that the supersalesman who ran Qwest and promised to transform it into a supercarrier left it as the only Baby Bell that no one wants to buy or merge with. To understand how badly messed up Qwest is, even the old independents telcos with undesirable properties in the sticks (AllTel, Contel, Centel, GTE, Frontier) were considered better acquisitions than Qwest that serves major metro areas (Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Seattle, Minneapolis, Omaha, Portland, etc.).
He should have “died” like ken lay. Left his family millions and spend his time elsewhere.
Good to know that there is life after death. I’m wondering why Shrub hasn’t signed the commutation order yet.
Here’s another rich, powerful straight white man (who probably votes Republican) facing prison time…..can’t have that happen.
Can you really prove that he died? I know, conspiracy theory and all. But I have seen enough crap from gov, to now know that some of it has truth (I am still trying to decide if it is sadly or happily).
…with Anna Nicole Smith.
are there, too.
….Anna Nicole is allegedly buried there, Elvis, Tupac, Jim Morrison, etc. elsewhere.
think Elvis and Tupac are alive and well and living on a far away Caribbean Island. Perhaps Ken Lay is with them. I think Jim Morrison is buried in a cemetary in France. I never heard a conspiracy theory alleging that he was in hiding.
….apparently now include sitting in your Rolls Royce in your 70 year birthday suit…..that is if you’re Prince Frederic von Anhalt. His Highness is also known as Mr. Zsa Zsa Gabor.
The Prince made news earlier this year with his unsuccessful bid for father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.
He explained his “situation” in the Rolls Royce as the result of being stripped and robbed by three women. No word on whether his virtue was compromised in any way by the three desperatas on the run. They did have a pair of handcuffs which they used on the Prince.
The news reports, of course, had to find SOME WAY to tie this story in with Paris Hilton (after all, Anna Nicole Smith was mentioned).
It turns out that His Highness was going to court on behalf of Zsa Zsa (who was fined for missing an earlier court appearance) where Zsa Zsa is involved in a civil suit against her daughter, Francesca Hilton, who in turn is Paris’ great aunt.
So Zsa Zsa must be Paris’ great, great aunt! Can’t you see the family resemblance.
No doubt we’ll hear from Gecko about how this story lacks a connection with Colorado politics but what the hell, it’s a slow day for political news and story is a hoot!
The saddest thing about this judgment is that the $52 million forfeiture won’t go to the retirees he screwed, it will go to the government.
From the standpoint of QWEST employees who got screwed, it’s a big “So What?”
The government needs the money worse than the retirees do. After all, we have a war to fight! And tens of thousands of earmarks to fund! And billions in corporate subsidies to hand out! The retirees can live on cat food. Inmate Nacchio will eat better than they do.
…here I’ve been thinking, admittedly logically, that the funds would go to the retirees.
Anyone know if there is anyway the retirees could capture some or all of that?
Insofar as a retiree is a shareholder, there is recompense.
I just received my share of the $2.65 BILLION settlement reached with AOL (recall the case where AOL inflated its revenues by exaggerating its advertising revenues). I probably had 500 or 600 shares of the stock. My share of the settlement was a whopping $58 and it took the parties (which included the government) 5 years to distribute the money to damaged shareholders.
By the time Joe’s $52 million goes through the judicial vega-matic, shareholders and retirees who got screwed might get a couple cents on the dollar in, say, 2012.
Great!
I bought Qwest at $1.15 (Thank You, Joe), three cents above its historical low, sold my IRA a month ago. It had worked up to $10 and change. Thank you, Notebart.
So, in a sense, I have mixed emotions about JN. Gave me a hell of a deal. But I love the justice.
Joe hurt more than just Qwest retirees. If you owned any growth mutual funds between 2000 and 2004, Joe’s greed and incompetent management and his ilk in the telecom industry took a big bite out of your wealth.
More than 100 telecoms went bankrupt in three years. The ones I recollect: MCI/WorldCom; Global Crossing; Adelphia; 360 Networks; Covad; Rythms; Winstar; GST; ICG; e-Spire; PSINet; MGC/Mpower; Genuity; Teligent; Ricochet Wireless; Excite@Home; McLeod USA; Williams Communications; Metromedia Fiber Networks; Teleglobe; XO Com.; ITC DeltaCom; Birch Telecom; Focal; Alliance Communications; Alligent Telecom; KPN/Qwest; FLAG; TouchAmerica (formerly Montana Power).
The telecom meltdown wiped out more than $4 TRILLION in market capitalization and 130,000 jobs in the US. Almost every growth fund was heavily invested in telecom companies and took a beating when the hypsters of the industry, like Joe, did not deliver and could not pay back the debt they had incurred building their “field of dreams.” Nearly six years later, growth index funds are still down 10-20%.
The only reason Qwest did not crater is that it was built on US West’s government protected monopoly.
Many of these now bankrupct companies (including the Qwest that bought US West) were the product of the Telecom Act of 1996, a Clinton era piece of legislation to introduce regulated competition to the industry that proved to be grossly complex and ultimately proved to be the full employment act for regulators and telecom lawyers.
Most of those companies weren’t worth anything and plenty of people knew it. There was purposeful mispricing of bandwith. I was covering quest through that poeriod. I talked with Robin Szelinga a half a dozen times in 2001, by the summer of 2001 (I think–my memory is getting hazy, its part of my past life) anyone who hadn’t drank the telecom Kool-Aid knew qwest was in trouble. What was surprising, and what seperated Nacho from the rest (well not MCI and Globalcrossing) was how fundamental the fraud was.
Telecom would have collapsed one way or another, with or without Nacho. Those jobs would have been lost and the stocks would have crashed. Qwests fraud didn’t cause those businesses to fail, it just hid that the business model was flawed.
I say that not to defend Nacho (He’s not just a crook, he’s a prick too), but to clarify how qwest actually impacted the telecom market.
Sure, many companies were not going to be long term survivors, but from my vantage point, I believe that Qwest played a big role in the industry’s troubles.
I watched Robin Szelinga testify before Congress in 2001 about Qwest’s business deals with Global Crossing.
The companies both had fiber optic cables — some of the fiber strands in the same physical cable. They were engaged in “capacity swaps” where one company swapped fiber capacity with the other. Sometimes the fiber being swapped was dark fiber that was idle and carried no telecom traffic. They would count the fiber capacity they gave away as revenue and account for the fiber they received as a capital asset to be depreciated over time. That way, they could tell Wall Street “Our revenue and profits grew this quarter” when, in fact, nobody was really buying services from them and their cable capacity had not changed. Sales guys got a commission, execs — like Robin — saw their stock options increase in value driven by the illusion that revenues were growing.
The Congressional testimony consisted of Qwest execs — including Szelinga — and Global Crossing execs trying to defend why these swaps really were revenues. The Congressmen I watched just rolled their eyes in disbelief, but it was apparent that the illusory revenue generating scheme permiated both Qwest and Global Crossing’s executive ranks.
In my opinion, a good deal of telecom’s collapse was due to execs like Nacchio who promoted a corporate culture where it was OK to engage in economically empty or fraudulent transactions and execs that lacked the spine to stand up and stop such junk. Growing revenues — even illusory revenues — was the mantra; reporting no or slow growth was not an option.
In Europe, Qwest’s joint venture with KPN declared bankruptcy and the 27,000 miles of cable it had throughout Europe was abrupty shut off, which stranded and killed a lot of start-up companies that relied on their facilities. I know several European telecom companies who would blame their failure on Qwest.
I’d also point out that the government regulators who are supposed to police the industry — the FCC, the Colorado PUC and every other state PUC — did absolutely nothing but watch the industry collapse and then say “Oh, that’s just how competition works.”
The fiber swaps were hinted at in the footnotes to the financials. If you knew about the culture over at Q, it was enough to figure out what was going on.
I agree with you on the cultural problems at qwest. Maybe in a few cases it cut the legs out from under a viable business, but in most cases it the companies were not viable.
Viable businesses can usually survive in some form.
I made a lot of money for my shareholders off Q as it was going bad, but I shouldn’t have–it was probably too agressive a strategy for a conservative fund.