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.
There hasn't been a single allegation that any politician did anything illegal regarding Enron, and it's highly doubtful that anyone did. Despite the attempts of our liberal disruptor to smear Wendy Gramm, there's no evidence that she did anything wrong, either.
Enron failed because of Enron. The lack of disclosure about losses is regrettable and needs to be addressed, but the losses occurred and would have been a problem even if they had been disclosed earlier.
The Democrats' attempt to paint this as a Republican scandal is laughable. It is also contemptible, but we've come to expect them to endorse dishonesty. This is simply another example.
The White House: That Invisible Mack Sure Can Leave His Mark By Michael Weisskopf/Washington
(TIME, September 1) --
For a man who had supposedly vanished from the corridors of power, MACK MCLARTY was the man to see in 1996. BILL CLINTON's former chief of staff, now a White House counselor tucked away in the basement, provided assistance to businessmen who ponied up $1.5 million for the Democrats in the last election. On Nov. 22, 1995, for example, Clinton scrawled an FYI note to McLarty, enclosing a newspaper article on Enron Corp. and the vicissitudes of its $3 billion power-plant project in India. McLarty then reached out to Enron's chairman, KEN LAY, and over the next nine months closely monitored the project with the U.S. ambassador to New Delhi, keeping Lay informed of the Administration's efforts, according to White House documents reviewed by TIME. In June 1996, four days before India granted final approval to Enron's project, Lay's company gave $100,000 to the President's party. Enron denies that its gift was repayment for Clinton's attention, and White House special counsel LANNY DAVIS says McLarty acted out of concern for a major U.S. investment overseas.
Nevertheless, there does seem to be a McLarty pattern. At Clinton's request, he met with international oil consultant ROGER TAMRAZ and asked the Energy Department if the Administration could not be more supportive of his Caspian Sea pipeline proposal (Tamraz' contribution: $200,000). It was McLarty who directed a White House lawyer to query the Justice Department about a case protested by VANCE OPPERMAN, head of a legal publishing house (contribution: $350,000). The counselor arranged a White House meeting for Miami computer executive MARK JIMENEZ to discuss political unrest in an important Latin American market (contribution: $325,000). And last week the Washington Post reported that McLarty helped get a Clinton audience for Federal Express chairman FRED SMITH and his concerns about Japanese trade practices. Contribution: $525,000. Davis says McLarty acted "appropriately" in every case.
By Michael Weisskopf/Washington
Time Magazine
LOL, Kierkegaard, couldn't have put it better myself!!!!!
Unlike the financial sideshow over a twenty-year-old failed land deal that dogged the Clinton administration....
or....
[Bush]locked out any voices opposed to his pro-business agenda....
or...
once Lay and his minions are required to testify before Congress.
I must admit, I never would've given these words in bold a second thought UNTIL I read B. Goldberg's book. I now read such unneccessary and obviously BIASED qualifiers and wonder how such people can call themselves objective?
Does anyone else notice how such a poorly written piece is by the executive editor of the website? Mr. Callaway doesn't even to pretend that anything he has written has any basis in reality. Maybe he's just trying out for the San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Page.
like whitewater, and like the S&L deal back in the eighties,
millions will be spent "getting to the bottom of the whole mess"
In the end,
fortunes were made by a few, while the investors/taxpayers foot the bill.
Sometime after the 2004 elections a report will be produced which shows "some mistakes were made", little else.
As a stockholder in Enron, it is my opinion that this was nothing more than the looting of an otherwise successful corporation.
bush and cheney's hands are as clean as clinton's were.
LADY YOU AIN'T NOTHING!!!!!!
I've talked to pedofiles in my life. Does that make me a pedofile?
Yeah--they want this news to knock the story of Bernie Goldberg's number one bestseller off the frontburner...
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