-Caveat Lector-
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp?source=blq/yhoo&siteid=
yhoo&dist=yhoo&guid=%7B903B88E7%2D7C09%2D4FC6%2DB706%2D49697A5B66F1%7D
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.
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
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