The real scandal is business as usual
Houston Chronicle
Jan. 27, 2002, 6:09PM
By JAMES HOWARD GIBBONS
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle
President Bush is proud his administration did nothing to help his cronies at Enron when the corporation's
stock collapsed. So far, the president has expressed no shame in doing Ken Lay's bidding up until that
point.
The scandal is not that Enron executives called senior administration officials when they got into trouble,
and vice versa. The scandal is that the president and his appointees placed the machinery of the executive
branch at the beck and call of Enron's chairman (whom irate creditors sacked last week) and other large
campaign donors right from the start.
The real and everlasting scandal is that the Bush administration, like all the others, makes so little effort to
discern the greatest good for the greatest number and pursue it.
Even after Enron's collapse, the Bush administration accelerated its efforts to please
big business by reversing key efforts to clean up the air and water. Bush and his
appointees don't want a more poisonous environment for its own sake, but they feel beholden
to the campaign financiers who prefer paying
candidates and parties to paying taxes.
President Bush -- congenitally dedicated to government by the few, for the few,
at the expense of the many -- let months go by before expressing disapproval of Enron
officials' deceit. Even feigned concern for abused workers, pensioners and small investors
does not occur naturally in the Bush White House, but must be
prescribed and scripted by highly paid political strategists.
There are ways to prevent corporate charades such as the one that made Enron insiders
rich beyond the dreams of avarice while impoverishing many employees and investors
kept in the dark: Congress and executive branch regulators must require honest
and transparent accounting.
The way things stand, certified corporate accounts have all the truth and accuracy
of real estate advertisements: "Envied location, distinguished address, world-class views"
to describe shunned, overpriced and dangerously deteriorated property.
However, the Bush administration and its allies in Congress are devoted to
creating and protecting accounting loopholes, offshore tax shelters and self-policing
schemes designed to excuse or ignore the worst
sort of cheating, fraud and dereliction of fiduciary duty.
Many of Enron's underhanded tactics (such as the infamous, off-book partnerships)
are enshrined in law. Americans can count on the Bush administration
to work assiduously to keep them enshrined.
The real scandal is that Enron's relationship to government is not the exception but
the rule -- just business as usual. Another homegrown example is Crescent Real Estate
Equities Ltd., familiar to Houstonians as the
Fort Worth company whose officials promised to build a badly needed convention
center hotel here and then went back on their word.
For years Crescent's principals did everything they could to help George W. Bush
and put him first in the governor's mansion and then in the White House. In turn, Bush's
backers at Crescent were rewarded with tax cuts and sweetheart deals involving state
property and pension funds.
Bush says he never spoke of these deals to his buddies and partners at Crescent,
and of course he didn't have to. Bush's minions knew instinctively to play ball when
the Crescent boys showed up with a bat.
AlthoughBush promised repeatedly to subsidize religious faith and inject it into every
sphere of American life, his cronies at Crescent are suing a Houston church to keep
it from leasing city-owned quarters in Greenway Plaza. The plaintiffs allege that
churchgoers are bad for business if they get too close and are
orse to have around than rowdy sports fans, rock concertgoers and other denizens
of Compaq Center.
I'm inclined to agree, but if the big shots at Crescent are so hostile to church people,
why did they back Bush? The answer might be that they (and presumably their candidate)
regarded all the pious rhetoric as so much slop to be thrown to the faithful and never intended
it to be taken seriously or to get in the way of big
business and its profits.
The Bush administration is so fond of official secrecy in aid of crony capitalism, which
it calls executive privilege, that it won't reveal the industry executives and influence peddlers
it invited in to draft the national energy policy. Don't the American people
paying the freight have any privileges that entitle them to know
what their government is up to?
When he ran for president, Bush promised to restore integrity to the White House.
If this is what integrity restored looks like, I could be persuaded to go back to
tawdriness and corruption.
Gibbons, senior editorial writer, is a member of the Chronicle Editorial Board. james.gibbons@chron.com
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