Posted on 01/10/2002 7:00:04 AM PST by brbethke
Enron is not Bush's Whitewater Commentary: It will be worse
By David Callaway, CBS.MarketWatch.com Last Update: 12:10 AM ET Jan. 10, 2002
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) - The Enron Corp. debacle won't be President Bush's Whitewater. It will be much worse.
Unlike the financial sideshow over a twenty-year-old failed land deal that dogged the Clinton administration, the collapse of the nation's largest energy trader into the nation's largest bankruptcy last month is set to go straight to the heart of exposing what is wrong with the way the Bush administration is conducting itself these days.
Once a buyer for Enron's (ENE: news, chart, profile) energy-trading business is announced Thursday in New York, this story is going to shift in dramatic fashion to Washington D.C., where there are already eight separate congressional probes into the collapse, one Justice Department investigation, and scores of unanswered questions. Many of them concern the White House.
Don't expect to see either Bush or Vice President Cheney directly linked to the financial shenanigans that brought Enron down. They won't be. This is not about finding a smoking gun, as much as some Democrats might wish it were.
What it is about, and what the public will get to hear and read about in wrenching detail over the coming months, is how business gets done down in Texas. How a small group of business leaders exert enormous clout over Bush and his team in getting the rules changed to their benefit.
It will explain why Bush has locked up presidential records, locked out any voices opposed to his pro-business agenda and rammed through an expensive economic plan that wiped out the budget surplus but to date hasn't had any positive effect on the economy.
It will explain what influence Enron Chief Executive Ken Lay and his advisers had with Cheney and his energy taskforce when they met six times last year while the Vice President was putting together the administration's energy policy.
And it will explain why Bush is now thinking about acting on a proposal from that very taskforce that seeks to roll back a key provision of the Clean Air Act that helps keep factory pollution down by requiring new controls when old plants are upgraded.
A history of seeking favor
Business leaders have always sought favors from politicians. That's nothing new. But in the case of Enron and Lay, a night in the Lincoln Bedroom was never going to be enough.
Enron cultivated Bush from the time he first decided to run for governor of Texas, with executives donating a total of $623,000 to his two gubernatorial campaigns and presidential campaign, according to The Center for Public Integrity.
The company played a major role in Bush's decision to deregulate the Texas energy markets in 1999. It played a major role in Cheney's energy taskforce last year, meeting with the Vice President's staff right up until a week before it stunned Wall Street in October by slashing its shareholder equity by $1.2 billion to cover losses in its off-balance sheet partnerships.
And Lay, who donated $100,000 to the Bush Inaugural, remains mired in a controversy about whether a curious phone conversation he had with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission head Curtis Hebert last May had anything to do with Hebert's replacement by Bush last summer with the head of the Texas Public Utility Commission.
This is just the beginning of what is going to come out once investigators do a little more digging, and once Lay and his minions are required to testify before Congress. Expect a steady diet of revelations about the extent of the energy giant's influence, at state, national and even international levels.
Enron won't bring down Bush. He remains enormously popular for his handling of the war and the rebuilding of the country's psyche after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But it will be a major thorn in his side through the rest of this presidential term, and may even play a role in the next election, depending on what comes out.
Enron the company will soon be gone. But Enron, the symbol of how big business and big politics conspire to sometimes fix the game, is just starting to dawn on the national conscious.
It's an ugly story. One that explains a lot about what's going on in our nation's capital right now. And it's only just beginning.
David Callaway is executive editor of CBS.MarketWatch.com.
And after the evening news is over, Tom Daschle will pat them on their cute little heads, give them all milk bones, and congratulate them on what good little media watchdogs they are.
If there are no "financial shenanigans" by Bush how could it be worse than Whitewater? I guess this author thinks people are just too stupid to ask that basic, threshold question before they decide if a "scandal" exists.
God bless the true patriot.
rushtafarian
I saw Blather on SeeBS just last night 'working' this ...
He (Tom 'Puff' Daschle) did a GOOD JOB of laying all the costs of "Airport Security" on the shoulders of the US taxpayer and OFF the airlines and airports themselves ...
Bush was on TV today talking about investigations into Enron so he is out front on this.
My personal belief in all this is it was all the non-energy crap that Enron got involved in that brought them down. They wanted to be a dot-commer like everyone else and got caught holding the bag. I don't think (and this is pure supposition on my part) that the energy trading part was flawed, just all the superfluous stuff. We shall see.
The Daschle mantra. David Callaway is an idiot and a shill.
Ah, I see. So the executive editor of the site gets to throw in his commentary, slamming our President but we're expected to believe See BS News is fair and balanced???????
Whatta bunch of clymers. I'm so glad I don't have to watch network TV or rely on their lamea** websites for news anymore.
Keep it up, See BS News...it'll be a delight watching your influence swirl down the commode.
But they sure will try and make it seem like they are.
Most people don't read articles, they skim them for a salient phrases. This is a hit piece intended to create doubt and muddy the waters, and as such it could have been written by the DNC. Maybe it was.
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