I don't see how these guys can make ends meet.
Taxpayer-supported international racketeering
"Other big donors were also invited to China. They also cut million-dollar deals and then sliced a percentage off for the DNC. Another news article kept by Ron Brown in his files listed Enron, Mission Energy, California Energy, Hughes, AT&T, Federal Express, Sprint and Chrysler as donating money to the DNC.
Ron Brown's Indonesia trip
"Furthermore, the EXIM bank under Brody financed over $4 billion dollars worth of gas deals with another energy company, Enron. Enron is also an Akim/Gump client. In fact, Enron executives traveled with Ron Brown in 1994 on trade missions to Russia, Indonesia and China, cutting EXIM and OPIC backed deals in each country. Enron is not only another Akin/Gump client but it is listed as one of forty-four such companies in which Rubin had "significant contact" with during his years at Goldman Sachs."
Who's who in the Commerce scandal
"Li Ka-Shing is not the only one to take advantage of the Clinton sponsored changes in the Maritime finance program. For example, two power barges for export to Indonesia made by Enron Corp., a large contributor to Bill Clinton, were also built through the DOT Maritime-funding program, and backed by $50 million in taxpayer financing. Another questionable ship deal included over $60 million to build a paddlewheel steam boat/casino. Still another deal landed millions in taxpayer supported loans for two floating combination hotel/casino barges.
Clinton Export Policy Helped India Hide The Bomb
"Another Brown document for the Russian trip, dated February 1994, lists Tamraz along with CEO's from Tenneco, Texaco, ARCO, Enron, Conoco, AT&T, Motorola, and Silicon Graphics. In 1994, Silicon Graphics, along with Tandem and several other major computer companies, hired Tony Podesta to lobby for them. Tony Podesta is the brother of John Podesta, Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary for Bill Clinton."
The power behind Kyoto
"But there are a few big corporations that favor some form of limits on so-called greenhouse gas emissions, and they are lobbying the Bush administration to be less implacable on the subject. The bad guy list includes Royal Dutch/Shell Group, BP, Cinergy, AEP, Entergy and Enron."
In 1988, he raised eyebrows by lobbying Argentina on behalf of a proposed Enron pipeline, again invoking Dad's name. Enron was headed by Bush family friend and Republican bankroller "Ken Lay".
From Here:
To represent its interests, Enron has employed former Secretary of State James Baker and former Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher from the Bush administration as well as former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen.
A 1993 New Yorker article reported that Baker and Bush's son Neil lobbied Kuwaiti officials that year to select Enron to rebuild a power plant destroyed in the Iraqi invasion.
Lay acknowledged that Baker was on an Enron retainer when he visited Kuwait in 1993 for ceremonies honoring the former president.
"I'm not sure [ Baker ] even mentioned our project while he was there," said Lay, who said the New Yorker article "was loaded with total inaccuracies and falsehoods."
The Nation magazine reported in 1994 that Bush's son George W. Bush phoned Argentina's public works minister in 1988 to ask him to award Enron a contract to build a natural gas pipeline.
"I felt pressured," the minister was quoted as saying. "It was not proper for him to make that kind of call." Enron later won the contract, the magazine reported.
Enron spokesman Mark Palmer said no member of the Bush family has ever had a financial or consulting relationship with the company. Palmer said George W. Bush, now governor of Texas, told Enron officials he never called the public works minister.
Enron's board of directors includes Wendy Gramm, wife of Sen. Phil Gramm (R., Texas). Wendy Gramm was appointed to the board in 1993, five weeks after resigning as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where she had supported Enron proposals to relax regulations on trading of energy futures. Enron and Gramm both said in published reports that there was no connection between her appointment and her actions as a regulator.
Tony Lentini, head of Apache Corp., a Houston oil and natural gas exploration company, said because Enron controls distribution of large supplies of energy, its futures traders have undue influence over prices.
"It's insider trading, but it's legal to have this superior knowledge and trade on it in the futures market," Lentini said. "Do the same stuff in the stock market, you go to jail."
Lay acknowledged that Enron, which invented several of the financial instruments now being used in the futures market, is a "very significant participant.
"I'm not sure that's the same as, quote, 'insider trading.' " Lay said. "We have a number of very strong competitors, including the major oil companies and the investment banking houses and electricity companies."
Last week, Enron's oil and gas subsidiary added to its board of directors Frank G. Wisner, who had reportedly helped Enron win a $2.8 billion contract for a power generating station as U.S. ambassador to India.
The New York Times reported in 1995 that Wisner "constantly cajoled" Indian officials and that the company also was aided by the Central Intelligence Agency, which assessed the strategies of the competing contractors.
Lay denied Enron received any assistance from the CIA: "To my knowledge, I don't think we've ever received any information from the CIA. When we go into these countries and bid on these projects, we rely solely on our own intelligence."
In July, Amnesty International issued a report accusing Indian police of beating and arbitrarily arresting opponents of the Enron project. The group accused police of "collusion" with Enron.
Enron officials acknowledge reimbursing the government for extra police at the site -- as it says it is required to do -- but denied any role in the alleged mistreatment. They said police were always under police control and not under the direction of Enron.
The project, the biggest international investment since India moved to open its economy in 1991, has become the object of protests by thousands of local residents who say the power-plant will take their homes and destroy their fishing grounds and coconut groves.
The opposition party won a state election in 1995 after a campaign in which it accused Enron of using bribery to win the contract. Although the accusers later retracted their bribery allegations, Enron was forced to renegotiate the deal at more favorable terms.
In Indonesia, Enron won a power plant contract through a partnership that includes the son of the country's president.
"There are very few large companies in Indonesia that do not have involvement with one or more members of the president's family," Lay said.
He insisted, however, that Enron abides by the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars companies from paying bribes abroad.
...Some analysts have suggested Enron has overextended itself financially in preparing for electric competition and could face ruin if deregulation stalls.
Lay insisted that won't happen.
[End of Partial Transcript]
DUBYA - From Oil to Baseball to the Governor's Mansion
an excerpt from "Enron: The Global Gospel of Gas":
In this country Enron has traditionally been a major supporter of the Republican party. Ken Lay, the chief executive of Enron, hosted the Republican national convention in Houston in 1992. After George Bush, the incumbent president, lost the 1992 election, Enron started to pump money into Democratic coffers such as Lloyd Bentsen, another Texan, and Clinton's first treasury. In one Senate election campaign, the Democrat received more than $14,000 from Enron. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Responsive Politics, the amount is the second highest paid out by Enron to a political campaign.
Bentsen quit his job as Treasury Secretary at the end of 1994 and was succeeded by Robert Rubin, who worked closely with Enron when he was co-chair of Goldman Sachs investment bank. Clinton first hired Rubin to head his National Economic Council. Soon afterwards, Rubin wrote on Goldman Sachs stationery to former clients, including Enron, saying he "looked forward to continuing to work with you in my new capacity."
After this ethical lapse, Rubin filed a White House financial disclosure form that listed Enron among the names of 42 former clients with whom he had had "significant contact." Rubin pledged to recuse himself from any government dealings affecting these former clients for one year, a period that has since lapsed.
Enron's lobbying clout was demonstrated in its attempts to deregulate the energy futures markets that enhance its profits. Enron was one of nine energy companies that asked the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in November 1992 to exempt energy derivative contracts from federal government oversight as well as from fraud laws. The request was made right after Bill Clinton won the U.S. presidential election at a time when the political composition of the board was likely to change soon. The five-member commission is made up of three members from the ruling party and two from the majority party.
The deregulatory push was advanced by Wendy Gramm, the CFTC chair, who authorized the commission staff to begin the lengthy rule-making process required when a federal agency makes a major policy decision. Gramm, a former senior staff member of the Reagan White House, resigned as chair of the commission on January 21, 1993, as Clinton took office. Wendy Gramm is the wife of Phil Gramm, the ultra-conservative Republican Senator from Texas.
Five weeks after Gramm resigned, she was appointed to Enron's board of directors, just as the commission voted two to one to deregulate the energy derivative contracts business. President Clinton had yet to appoint anyone to the two vacant seats on the CFTC board; the commissioners who embraced deregulation were Gramm allies appointed during the Bush administration.
The regulatory exemption for energy futures was made retroactive to 1974 - when the CFTC was created - to remove any potential legal challenges to past energy contracts. The exemption from fraud legislation that the industry wanted was dropped in response to objections in Congress. Gramm and Lay say there is no connection between the CFTC decision and Gramm's appointment to Enron's board.
Enron has also been under fire for the environmental impact of its activities at a company power plant in Boston. Each day, for six weeks in the summer of 1995, a million litres of water were trucked to the plant just outside Boston to prevent the Charles river from shrinking to less than half its normal flow as a result of plant operations.
In the early 1990s Enron bid for a contract to rebuild Shuaiba North, a 400-megawatt power plant that supplied 5 percent of Kuwait's electricity before it was bombed during the 1991 Gulf war, according to journalist Seymour Hersh.
Hersh wrote in a 1993 New Yorker magazine article that Enron's price for supplying the power is 11 cents a kilowatt hour. The rival bid put forward by the German company Deutsche Babcock was six cents, while the state-subsidized rate is half-a-cent a kilowatt hour.
Despite the large price difference, Hersh noted that Enron's bid received favorable consideration after help arrived from former US president George Bush, a good friend of Enron founder and chief executive Kenneth Lay. Lay, raised funds for Bush's 1992 re-election bid and hosted the reception committee for the Republican National Convention that year.
In 1993 Bush visited Kuwait along with former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. At the time Baker, former Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, as well as Thomas Kelly, the director of operations for Bush's Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf war, were on payroll working for Enron.
Hersh says in his New Yorker article that Baker, along with the former president's two youngest sons, Neil and Marvin, remained in Kuwait after Bush left to promote the Enron bid to rebuild Shuaiba with the Kuwaiti utility ministry. Their efforts apparently paid off initially. Hersh's sources told him that Enron's Kuwaiti business partners in the bid to rebuild Shuaiba had "obviously been hand picked" by the Kuwaiti prime minister. Enron calls the New Yorker article "completely incorrect." The company now says it has abandoned the project in Kuwait.
In Mozambique, the Philippines and Argentina, Enron has been accused of putting pressure on the local authorities through powerful figures in the United States government.
75 Posted on 01/11/2000 15:54:12 PST by Boyd