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.
This snippet alone invalidates the whole piece ...
Trying to shine a kleig light only on Texas will fail, I predict. Mainly because Enron's business was done during the years Clinton was in office and the ties to that administration will be obvious.
That's a bit unkind.
The thing I love about the Internet is that it does permit you to read information from all manner of sources, and decide who's closest to telling you the truth. As a young reporter I was *stunned* to see how much news is out there that never makes it into the local paper or the evening broadcast, and how the national networks don't so much report news as manufacture news product.
Consider it this way: if you don't look at the information sources your opposition is using, how can you ever hope to debate and defeat them?
My guess is that this story is coming out of California, from someone who wasn't privy to the close Clinton administration ties to Enron and has an axe to grind with Bush over the energy policy.
Bush has been so squeeky clean, I had begun to believe that not even a whiff of scandal would ever arise. So, as I was reading this article I wondered to myself, what's going on? I thought, hmmm well, is this a whiff of scandal or pure axe grinding by some liberal candy ass that pisses sitting down?
And then I noticed that the silly bitch Callaway thinks that a tax cut is "an expensive economic plan that wiped out the budget suprlust but to date hasn't had any positive effect on the economy." And that's when I knew, laddies and lasses, that Callway is chomping soup sandwiches with his thumb up his arse.
True enough, but the media will ignore the Clinton angle, not because it's Clinton, but because it's a better story when it's about who's in power now.
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.
THAT'S RIGHT! Enron will explain why Buffalo, NY had record breaking snowfall this year! It will explain why Michael Jackson still thinks he has a career! It will explain how acne medicine causes terrorism! It will explain who that girl is in Madonna's song "Who's That Girl?" It will explain why parents often answer the question "why" with "because I said so!" It will explain the ending of the movie "Memento" and allow you to feel sympathy for the main character! It will reveal the whereabouts of the Loch Ness Monster, Sasquatch, and Al Gore's personality!
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