-Caveat Lector- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2002 06:59:36 -0000 From: robalini <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Konformist: 'It Would Help Enron If You Made That Call'
Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com 'It Would Help Enron If You Made That Call' Bush Was Told By Ed Vulliamy The Observer - London 1-13-2 As he approaches the first anniversary of his inauguration, George W Bush is under siege. He has won the war in Afghanistan, but finds himself engaged in a new battle against a scandal that is threatening to dog his administration and tarnish his reputation . Bush and his administration have been revealed as entwined in a story of corporate greed and political manipulation by an energy firm called Enron, now under double criminal investigation. The scandal - in which the life savings and retirement funds of tens of thousands of employees vanished while a number of executive directors lined their pockets - reaches so high that John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, has had to withdraw from the investigation because he received Enron money, and lawsuits are the pipeline to force Vice-President Dick Cheney for details of his contacts with the company. The day Bush took office - a year ago next Saturday - was as cold and comfortless as his victory; his motorcade braved driving rain and a gauntlet of demonstrations marking the most contested and ugliest election result in US history. After 11 September, the world changed and so did America's view of Bush. He became the only President since Franklin Roosevelt to maintain the support of over 80 per cent of Americans for weeks on end. But now the White House is laid bare by what rivals call 'Enronomics' - the political fable of the Enron corporation. It has long been reported how the Bush administration and family is beholden to the energy industry. Before the Afghan war, an 'Energy Task Force' favourable to the industry was the main concern for Cheney, who himself came to office from the biggest oil equipment firm in the world. Enron was just the kind of scandal a war would hide. The company plunged from a stock rating worth $60 billion - seventh on the Fortune list of US companies - into the biggest bankruptcy filing in US history, registered on 2 December. The ethical - maybe criminal - core of the scandal is that Enron trapped its employees into a 'stock-lock', whereby they were not allowed to sell share options bought by way of savings. When the company collapsed, they lost everything. Meanwhile, Enron's executives - blessed by inside information and foresight - made a killing by scrambling to sell shares before the price collapsed. The victims of Enron's rise and fall were regular employees who opted to join a savings plan by investing in their employer - and why not? With soaring energy prices and giddy profits, the share value quadrupled between 1997 and January last year. The catch was they were not allowed to sell. They were people like Pat Betteridge, of the subsidiary Portland General Electric company in Oregon, who remembers grand claims by Enron chief executive Kenneth Lay on a visit north: 'We like to think of ourselves,' he bragged, 'as the Microsoft of the energy world.' Betteridge used his $300,000 retirement savings to buy 3,500 shares - now worth not a cent. 'If I was hired to do electrical work and I botched it as bad as them,' he says, 'I'd either be doing time or get my licence yanked.' The beneficiaries of the company's surge to power were those who boarded the wheel of perpetual motion that binds the Bush administration to the energy industry. Then the company's brass even tried to make their fortune out of its fall as well. The Observer has dug into Enron's past to find that intimate connections with Bush and his Texan Republicans started long before the campaigns that brought them to Washington Enron is a Houston-based utility trading company that sells energy to consumers, industrial and domestic. It is one of the biggest of its kind in the world - a standing it owes in no small part to Bush's governorship in Texas. Texas's 1992 Energy Policy Act opened a regulatory black hole into which Enron moved and thrived, forcing established utility companies to buy energy from it. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, under the presidency of Bush's father, allowed for an exemption in trading energy subsidiaries. The practice would be Enron's downfall. The 1992 trading commission was chaired by Wendy Gramm, wife of Texas Senator Phil Gramm, close friend of the Bush family and recipient of $97,350 in political donations from Enron. Once the exemption was accomplished, Mrs Gramm resigned to join the Enron board. As a member of its current audit committee, she is expected to play a key role in the forthcoming lawsuits and criminal investigation into bankruptcy and document destruction. In 1997, Enron was anxious to break into Pennsylvania, one of America's biggest energy markets, with its huge consumers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The company was having difficulty, and Lay asked Bush (who liked to call him 'Kenny boy') to help. Bush duly called the then state governor, Tom Ridge, to pitch for Enron, whose bid duly succeeded. 'I called George W to kind of tell him what was going on,' said Lay at the time, 'and I said it would be very helpful to Enron if he could just call the governor and tell him Enron is a serious company'. Ridge was made Secretary of Homeland Security - Bush's new White House office - after 11 September. Lay and Enron have been bountiful contributors to George Bush Jnr. Since 1993, company executives have donated nearly $2 million to him personally. Lay also donated $326,000 in soft money to the Republican Party over the three years prior to Bush's presidential bid and his wife added $100,000 for the inauguration festivities. The administration is splattered with senior officials owning stock in Enron. Economic adviser Larry Lindsay and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick went straight from Enron's payroll into office. The biggest holding is that of Army Secretary Thomas White, who as a former Enron executive holds stock and options totalling $50m to $100m. Rove himself holds as much as $250,000 in stock, and other holders include Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his assistant William Winkenwerder, Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Weinberger, Economic Undersecretary Kathleen Cooper, Education Undersecretary Eugene Hickock, the ambassadors to Russia, Ireland, the Emirates and officials in the energy department, including its chief financial officer Bruce Carnes. It is not known which - if any - of these privileged stockholders sold their shares along with the Enron bosses, or suffered the same loss as everyone else. Such details will appear when they make this year's filings - leaving any that did so open to ethical, if not criminal, inquiry. Bush has pursued the aggressive deregulation policies preferred by Enron and its kind, including legislation that exempts key elements of Enron's energy business from oversight by the federal government - pushed by none other than Senator Phil Gramm. Lay's hand can meanwhile be found behind such episodes as the sudden replacement of Curtis Hebert as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Texan Pat Wood, a friend of Lay. According to one source, the sacking after only weeks in the job came after 'an unsettling telephone conversation with Kenneth Lay' in which he was 'prodded to back a faster pace in opening up access to the electricity transmission grid'. For all its troubles, Enron continued to benefit from Bush policies - markedly a refusal to step in and help California during the energy crisis last year, leaving consumers to pay the price... to Enron. Enron was so close to the bosom of the administration that Lay and other executives were called to the White House for six meetings with Cheney and his staff - the last one only a week before the company made the staggering announcement that it was slashing shareholder equity by $1.2bn. For Enron was playing a double game. In the run-up to the announcement, its president, Greg Whalley, was frantically lobbying another wing of the administration for help in arranging loans. His point man was Undersecretary Peter Fisher. Lay discussed the upcoming bankruptcy twice with Commerce Secretary Don Evans - one of the Texan 'Iron Triangle' that propelled Bush to power. Later, he also twice pleaded Enron's case to Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. But the Republicans were not the only political heavyweights to benefit from Enron's greed. The company has made donations to many Democrats too - some 27 per cent of its political contributions, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics in Washington. And among Enron's top point men in Washington during the bankruptcy saga was Clinton's former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who was revealed by the Washington Post yesterday as having made a representation last November to the current Treasury on behalf of the company. Rubin is now chairman of the executive committee of the Citigroup bank, one of Enron's principal backers, trying, with the JP Morgan bank, to raise $1.5bn in an effort to see the company through the bankruptcy crisis. These are matters for the six Congressional committees preparing to investigate Enron. But they will have to wait for the two criminal investigations launched this week: one into Enron's bankruptcy, the other into the admission by the company's auditor, Arthur Andersen, that it destroyed thousands of documents about the bankruptcy. Andersen had good reason to destroy the papers. The reasons for Enron's destruction when all the winds seemed to blow behind the company's fortunes are associated with the labyrinth of subsidiaries built up by Chief Finance Officer Andrew Fastow, fired on 24 October, and other executives. Fastow created partnerships with what were described as outside, independently-run companies with names such as 'Chewco' or 'Jedi' - after characters in Star Wars - that were owned by him or others with Enron backing. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars were slushing overseas to tax havens as Fastow and other executives - so they said - sought to shore up the company against a possible fall in energy prices. What they were allegedly doing was amassing personal fortunes. The ensuing gaps in the balance sheet became a gaping abyss which could not be hidden and down which the company finally fell. Enron admitted that it had overstated profits by $400m in reports issued since. However, Chewco alone enabled Enron to be able to keep some $600m of debt off its books. The crucial criminal issue is whether executives misled investors by inflating revenues and minimising debts. The political issue is how closely entwined is the Washington elite - and the immediate circle around Bush. Seven months of Bush's oil-friendly presidency was driven out of the spotlight by 11 September. It had pleased the industry for its isolationism and determination to withdraw from world affairs - the Kyoto Accords on global warming or arms reduction with Russia. Domestically, Bush's cause was an articulate one: a tax cut worth $1.3 trillion, of which nine-tenths went to the 1 per cent of wealthiest Americans, and ambitions to drill for oil across the Alaskan wilderness and deregulate controls over the oil and energy industries. By the afternoon of 11 September, Bush had become the vanishing president during his people's hour of need, cowering underground beneath an Air Force base in remote Nebraska. But by the end of that week, Americans saw in Bush not a spoiled brat, but the man they wanted to lead the nation to war. Now the Enron scandal brings the presidency home, with Bush as Winston Churchill preparing for the 1945 election in Britain. The would-be Clement Attlee is Tom Daschle, leader of the Senate Democrats, who last week left the unity of war behind to unleash his congressional campaign for November 2002 with an offensive over welfare, tax policy, health care, energy and the environment. The elections are critical to Bush and the Republicans: no US president apart from Nixon and Reagan has not lost ground at the mid- term polls, and the Democrats, even without making substantial gains, can keep control of the Senate while taking over the House and state governorships. For the State of the Union address Bush will give on the twenty- ninth of this month, White House staff are scrambling to entwine the war in Afghanistan with the continuing domestic agenda. But the minefield they must cross is named Enron. http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,631991,00.html If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit: http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist Or, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!" (Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool catch phrase.) Visit the Klub Konformist at Yahoo!: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/klubkonformist Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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