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Strategies & Market Trends : Zeev's Turnips - No Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (21909)	1/15/2002 3:01:35 AM
From: JOHN A.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 99280

(Mr.)Enron Also Bankrolled (his buddy) Clinton and Democrats Mr. Lay personally gave Republican organizations $325,000 during the 2000 campaign. The company itself was often more evenhanded. . The corporation contributed $532,000 in unregulated "soft money" to Democratic coffers during the 2000 election, only slightly less than the $623,000 that went to Republican groups, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a Washington research group. . Enron's political action committee also gave $10,000 to the New Democrat Network, which was co-founded by Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democratic vice presidential nominee that year. He now chairs the Senate Government Affairs Committee, which is leading an inquiry into Enron's collapse. . Several senior Enron officials spent election night at Vice President Gore's headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee. . The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that Republicans received 73 percent of total donations from Enron, its executives and its employees over the past 12 years. Still, many of the congressional members soon to investigate Enron - Democrats as well as Republicans - have enjoyed the company's largess. Enron or its executives have given money to nearly half of all current House members, and to almost three-quarters of the senators, according to groups monitoring political donations. . As Enron transformed itself from an old-line gas pipeline company into an innovative, risk-taking trader of gas, electricity and more exotic derivatives in the early 1990s, it needed both Democrats and Republicans to help remove regulatory obstacles. . "Ken Lay would write letters and pick up the phone to call whoever was needed, and the party didn't matter that much," said one former employee. . In 1992, a Democratic-controlled Congress approved a major energy bill that set the stage for a new wholesale electricity marketplace. Trading companies such as Enron could use the transmission lines of regulated utility companies to sell blocs of electricity to private customers. . In 1994, the Washington-based Export-Import Bank approved a $302 million loan to promote Enron's investment in a power plant in Dabhol, India. According to a 1997 article in Time magazine, Mr. Clinton took a personal interest in the project, deputizing his chief of staff, Thomas (Mack) McLarty III, to monitor it. Mr. McLarty later became a paid adviser to Enron. . A McLarty aide said that the White House involvement was part of a broader administration effort to help U.S. companies take advantage of new opportunities abroad. . In 1996, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, stocked with Clinton appointees, helped Enron with a series of orders that weakened the monopoly of nuclear and coal-burning utilities. In July of that year, Enron gave $100,000 to the Democratic Party. . The Clinton administration's interest in an international agreement to combat global warming also dovetailed with Enron's business plans. Enron officials envisioned the company at the center of a new trading system, in which industries worldwide could buy and sell credits to emit carbon dioxide as part of a strategy to reduce greenhouse gases. Such a system would curtail the use of inefficient coal-fired power plants that emitted large amounts of carbon dioxide, while encouraging new investments in gas-fired plants and pipelines - precisely Enron's line of business. . But the effort faced powerful opposition from automakers, oil companies and utilities. In early 1997 the Senate unanimously instructed the administration not to agree to any carbon-reducing strategy that would harm the U.S. economy. . On Aug. 4, 1997, Mr. Lay and seven other energy executives met with Mr. Clinton, Mr. Gore and other top officials at the White House to discuss the U.S. position at the upcoming conference on global warming in Kyoto, Japan. Mr. Lay, in a memo to Enron employees, said there was broad consensus in favor of an emissions-trading system. . Enron officials later expressed elation at the results of the Kyoto conference. An internal memo said the Kyoto agreement, if implemented, would "do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States." iht.com