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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JakeStraw who wrote (463401)	9/23/2003 9:41:49 AM
From: sylvester80	Respond to of 769670

Enron's Ken Lay: Bush Pioneer tpj.org Political Contributions: Bush Gubernatorial Races: $122,500 Republican Hard Money: $145,850 Republican Soft Money: $250,000 Democratic Hard Money: $39,000 Democratic Soft Money: $0 Federal PAC Hard Money: $17,200 Total Contributions: $574,550 Soft Money from Employer: $1,953,350 to Republicans: $1,501,000 to Democrats: $452,350 The $550,025 that the Enron Corp. gave Bush over the years makes it his No. 1 career patron, according to the Center for Public Integrity. “Virtually every … aspect of Enron’s operations is overseen by the federal government,” a ’96 Dallas Morning News story noted. Not surprisingly, this global natural gas giant and its top executive are big political contributors who keep revolving doors whirling. Lay hired President Bush’s cabinet members James Baker and Robert Mosbacher as they left office. After President Bush’s ’93 Gulf War victory tour of Kuwait, Baker and other members of his entourage stayed on to hustle Enron contracts. The Clinton administration also threatened to cut Mozambique’s aid in ’95 if the world’s poorest country awarded a pipeline contract to a different company. Enron got Bush to contact Texas’ congressional delegation in ’97 to promote a corporate welfare program in which U.S. taxpayers finance political risk insurance for the foreign operations of corporations such as Enron. Enron plants around Houston—which surpassed LA for the title to the nation’s worst air—are “grandfathered” air polluters that exploit a loophole in state law to avoid installing modern pollution-control technologies. Earlier this year the Houston Astros inaugurated their new Enron Field, which was financed with $180 million in public tax dollars and $100 million from Enron. In return, Enron landed tax breaks and a $200 million contract to power the stadium. Topping Enron’s political wish list in Texas was deregulation of the state’s electrical markets. Bush signed this dream into law in ’99.