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.
Wrong, how do you think they were able to excape finfancial disclosure regulations that would have exposed the hidden debt that you mention?
Easy. It's called "creative accounting" and businesses do that all the time. The banks helped them with that little detail, too.
Naw, ain't gonna happen'.
Seems "we" don't even want the Clintons' heads on a pole.
"Let's move along, no use bringing up the past."
Wonder if this is why Senator Gramm is not going to run again?
My guess is it's because Liberals spend more time indoors reading than outdoors doing. I have a lot of friends who are Liberals, and while they can be terrifically intelligent, witty, and well-read people, as a class they tend to fall painfully short in the common-sense and practical knowledge areas.
For example, I hate to be self-referential, but here's a case in point.
Cut me a break. Saying a molehill is a mountain won't make that molehill BECOME a maountain, any more than simply insisting that a pencil is a pen will make that pencil - POOF!!!- become a pen.
I did. Read this bit again:
In 1976, Brown was a co-organizer of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance - and spent time in New Hampshire jails for sitting in front of bulldozers at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant construction site.
So this energy crisis: it's his fault!
LOL...Good thinkin'!
They are missing from the accounting firm, so unless you're going to allege that she had something to do with that, you're grasping at straws.
You are out of your mind. You really have no clue as to how corporations operate and what the role of someone who is on the Board of Directors is, do you?
You live in some dreamland where Wendy Gramm was something like a full-time employee of Enron where she secretly conspired with the auditors to swindle the public and the employees in exchange for huge payments. Now, she's ordered them to destroy all records of that, right?
Put away that bong.
(I thought I was flipping out there for a minute, but a kindly moderator led me here.)
I wanted this article up for all to read....portends the salivating CBS etal will be doing to tar President Bush and VP Cheney with the Enron brush.
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