The Enron Box (The Nation Mag screws up!)
The Nation | 01/17/2002 | Matt Bivens
thenation.com
Check out the first sentence:
When George W. Bush co-owned the Houston Astros and construction began on a new stadium, Kenneth Lay agreed to spend $100 million over thirty years for rights to name the park after Enron. As Bush was running for President, Lay's Enron lent the candidate the Enron corporate jet fourteen times (his campaign reimbursed Enron a laughably low $60,000 for those flights). All told, Enron and its employees have contributed $736,800 to our President's political career--far more than any other corporation. That includes the $10,000 chairman Lay and his wife, Linda, donated to the Bush/Cheney 2000 Recount Fund, as well as the $300,000 Enron leaders spent on the Bush/Cheney post-recount-crushing inaugural party. (But it does not include money given at one remove, say, to the Republican National Committee during Bush's presidential run.) And when Enron Field opened in April 2000, Bush and Lay had the best seats in the stadium--in the Enron box.
The Enron box is a compassionate place, and it's found room for plenty of executive-branch players. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey and fast-track trade proselytizer Robert Zoellick each earned $50,000 a year as Enron advisers. Secretary of the Army Thomas White Jr., a former Enron executive, had to sell $25 million of Enron stock upon assuming his post. Enron's Lay--as candidate George Bush's most-deep-pocketed patron--has a good relationship with Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, whose previous job was as the Bush/Cheney campaign tapper of deep pockets. Attorney General John Ashcroft is another who has received Enron cash for past political campaigns, $57,499 to be exact, which is why he has recused himself from investigating.
Two reports just released by the Center for Public Integrity--both based on the nonprofit, nonpartisan center's studies of the finances and affiliations of the top 100 officials in the Bush Administration--offer added context. Looking just at Enron, the center's study turned up fourteen executive-branch officials who owned stock in Enron, collectively valued when disclosed at from $284,000 to $886,000 (the spread is so broad because officials report income in approximate ranges). One of the largest Enron stock holdings--ranging from $100,001 to $250,000 in value at the time of filing--was in the hands of Karl Rove, a prominent adviser who has been close to Bush since his Texas days. More broadly, the center's study found this to be one of the richest and most corporate presidential administrations in history. The average net worth of the President, Vice President and the Cabinet falls between $9.9 million and $28.9 million--more than ten times the average net worth of the Clinton Administration lineup. And not for nothing do they call it Grand Ole Petroleum: The top 100 Administration officials have the vast majority of their financial holdings invested in the energy sector, some 221 separate investments worth up to $144.6 million. Meanwhile, corporate energy gave 75 percent of its $48.3 million in 1999-2000 campaign contributions to Republicans. Oil and gas gave $13 to candidate Bush for every $1 it gave to candidate Gore.
The Enron box also has cushy seating for hundreds in Congress. Throughout the 1990s Enron gave $5.8 million to political campaigns, 73 percent of it to Republicans. Among the biggest winners in the Senate have been Texas Republican Senators Phil Gramm ($97,350) and Kay Bailey Hutchison ($99,500). The Gramms also gained personally because Wendy Gramm, Phil's wife, was hired to the Enron board with significant compensation. With just six days left in her tenure as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gramm rammed through a surprising decision that Enron had asked her for: A surrender of the commission's authority over regulating energy futures contracts. Five weeks later, after leaving the commission, Gramm was working for Enron.
Enron has favored Texas Republicans in the House as well, notably majority leader Tom DeLay. In addition to the $28,900 that Enron or its executives have contributed directly to DeLay's career, the company has hired as lobbyists Ed Buckham, who is DeLay's former chief of staff, and Karl Gallant, the former director of Americans for a Republican Majority, DeLay's political action committee. Today Gallant also runs the Republican Majority Issues Committee, another DeLay-tied fundraising vehicle, and since 1995, Enron and its executives have given these DeLay-friendly organizations more than $133,000.
And then there is the special case of Marc Racicot, who until two weeks ago was a registered lobbyist for Enron. Racicot is now the national chairman of the Republican Party, and not so long ago he was saying he intended to continue working as a lobbyist while running the party. Certainly, the two posts seem almost indistinguishable. But that was perhaps too open an admission. So Racicot has cleared things up by explaining he won't actively lobby--but he will still get his lobbyist's six-figure paycheck while the GOP pays him $1 a year. Which makes things much clearer.
Then again... Ken Lay played golf with Bill Clinton , and according to a 1997 Time magazine article, Clinton took a personal interest in Enron's efforts to build a power plant in India--a project his Administration's export-import bank loaned $302 million toward. Dick Cheney may, or may not, have bunkered down in an undisclosed secure location with Lay to design the President's National Energy Plan--but it was Clinton and Al Gore who received Lay and seven other energy executives at the White House to talk about the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Enron was elated by that treaty because the company, which specializes in trading esoteric goods, was excited about trading pollution credits around the world. But Bush killed that as a potential business. (Bush's career $736,800 from Enron is still less than the $2.9 million he received from all energy companies in 1999-2000 alone.) Enron gave the big bucks to Bush, Gramm and DeLay, and could be relied upon to sprinkle cash across Republicans at the state level, including $1,500 from the Lays and Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling to Florida's Jeb Bush (and $500 from corporate HQ for Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris--remember her?). But Enron also gave $13,750 to presidential candidate Al Gore, and similarly symbolic sums to other leading Democrats: $1,000 to Ted Kennedy, $950 to Hillary Clinton, $6,000 to Tom Daschle. Even the Straight-Talk Express himself, John McCain, picked up a few thou.
Enron has been giving money to politicians ever since George Bush Sr. was President back in the 1980s, and in return for at least $13,000 (records from 1988 are still being studied), the White House had Lay over for, yes, a sleep-over. Now Enron is suddenly embarrassing, so everyone's backpedaling and pointing fingers. The Republican Senatorial National Committee returns a $100,000 check from Enron, and the Republican Governor's Association returns $60,000; but when it comes to one-upmanship in ethically challenged Washington, the best the Democratic Senatorial National Committee can do is announce it's not returning its $100,000 Enron check because the company doesn't deserve it, and instead is looking for a suitable charity to send it to. A suggestion: Give it to a watchdog outfit that tracks campaign spending, like the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org), the Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org) or the National Institute on Money in State Politics (www.followthemoney.org); or to a more activist campaign-finance reform outfit like Public Campaign (www.publicampaign.org). |
