Posted on 01/11/2002 4:26:46 PM PST by Pokey78
THE White House response to the collapse of Enron, a Texas-based energy company with strong links to the Bush administration, has "shades of Bill Clinton", a conservative watchdog said yesterday.
Judicial Watch, a legal group that pressed Mr Clinton in the latter years of his presidency by investigating every aspect of his personal and professional life, called for a special counsel to investigate the Enron case.
Tom Fitton, the group's president, said: "The White House has a nice little scandal on its hands with Enron and they have only themselves to blame. Their reaction certainly has shades of Bill Clinton." The criticism is an indication of the potential risks of the Enron controversy.
Judicial Watch would normally support a conservative president such as Mr Bush. Enron applied for bankruptcy protection last November after overstating its profits by more than £400 million by hiding huge debts in the accounts of subsidiaries.
Its board is being investigated over allegations that 29 current or former members sold their shares for a total of £785 million in the months before the collapse. Thousands lost jobs and money when the Enron share price collapsed from almost £65 to only a few pence in less than a year.
The Houston-based company has close links to the Bush White House. Kenneth Lay, its chairman, is a friend of both President Bush and his father and was one of the principal fundraisers for the Bush-Cheney election campaign in 1999-2000.
Dick Cheney, the vice-president, had close contacts with Mr Lay when Halliburton, another Houston-based energy company of which he was formerly chief executive, built a baseball stadium for Enron.
Two senior members of the administration, Larry Lindsey, the President's chief economic adviser, and Robert Zoellick, the US trade representative, worked as consultants with Enron before Mr Bush recruited them.
The White House said on Thursday that Mr Lay called on Paul O'Neill, the treasury secretary, and Don Evans, the commerce secretary, to help the company in the days before it collapsed, but added that they had turned him down, despite his close links to the president and his party.
But Mr Fitton yesterday called on the White House to be more open. "Conservatives are very uncomfortable about the relations between the Bush White House and Enron and I doubt you will see many coming forward to defend the conduct, at least so far."
He was particularly critical of Mr Cheney's efforts to prevent the release of the minutes of meetings he and his staff held with Mr Lay and other Enron executives in the process of formulating the administration's energy policy.
Everything comes down to these illegal aliens these days folks...
The People will, in general, always abdicate their individual power. Few can gather the necessary information, absorb it and form their own opinion and act upon it while living a life, working at a job and raising a family.
The only way to "check" power is to distribute it as equally as possible. And we cannot control which entity people will hand their power to. It will invariably become concentrated.
And human nature says that power corrupts.
Sadly, we are mere sinners.
Buckeroo will be down by the track waiting for Grover Cleveland's whistle stop tour to arrive.
Could you elaborate on that statement? What evidence of Bush Administration corruption have you uncovered in your investigation?
We don't need a large Federal Government, but we will have an aggragately large government even if we move the center of influence to the States or Counties. Which is preferable.
A stable government is always an indicator of enlightenment and prosperity. Government is necessary, because "just nobility" needs to be enforced. It's how we organize our society in a peaceful way.
It is obscene that the Federal Government spends $2 trillion annually. We don't need any of Carter's cabinet Departments. Medicare is a cesspool of fraud and bill padding, the EPA is unaccountable to anyone, and HUD is a complete disaster of unfathomable proportions. We are wasting billions on military bases we no longer need or can afford, but which Congress will not shut down because they are necessary to support local economys. How inefficient and wasteful is Social Security? Checks for millions of Americans are drawn, cut and MAILED on a monthly basis. The 2000 Census cost us $56 billion, but they contracted a U of M professor to crunch demographic numbers with a $1.3 million grant. Why not just hire the guy for $300,000? No Census employee can set up an Oracle data base internally within a $56 million budget? It's a scam.
So no ... we don't need THIS big a government. We're being jobbed in a major way.
So it was Enron's $900 thousand out of Bush's $250 million campaign fund that put Dubya over the top? It's amazing how specifically you can identify that contribution and demonstrate its impact.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.