The Ken Lay/George Bush connection and other Enron chickens coming home to roost

1. Ken Lay--Guilty. George Bush--Guilty
By John Nichols

The man who paid many of the biggest bills for George Bush's political ascent, Enron founder Kenneth Lay, has been found guilty of conspiracy and fraud almost five years after his dirty dealings created the greatest corporate scandal in what will be remembered as an era of corporate crime.

On the sixth day of deliberations following the conclusion of a long-delayed federal trial, a Houston jury found Lay guilty on six counts of fraud and conspiracy. In a separate decision, US District Judge Sim Lake ruled that Lay was guilty of four counts of fraud and making false statements.

The same jury that convicted Lay found Enron's former chief executive, Jeffrey Skilling, guilty on 19 counts of fraud, conspiracy, making false statements and engaging in insider trading.

Lay, who President Bush affectionately referred to as "Kenny-boy" when the two forged an alliance in the 1990s to advance Bush's political ambitions and Lay's business prospects, contributed $122,500 to Bush's gubernatorial campaigns in Texas. Lay would later explain to a PBS "Frontline" interviewer that, though he had worked closely with former Texas Governor Ann Richards, the Democrat incumbent who Bush challenged in 1994, he backed the Republican because "I was very close to George W."

Needless to say, once Bush became governor, Lay got his phone calls returned. A report issued by Public Citizen in February, 2001, months before the Enron scandal broke, identified Lay as "a long-time Bush family friend and an architect of Bush's policies on electricity deregulation, taxes and tort reform while Bush was Texas governor."

No wonder Lay had Enron give $50,000 to pay for Bush's second inaugural party in Austin in 1999 -- a showcase event that was organized by Karl Rove and others to help the Texas governor step onto the national political stage.

After Bush gave Enron exactly what it wanted in 1999, by signing legislation that deregulated the state's electrical markets, Lay knew he had found his candidate for president.

When Bush opened his campaign, Lay opened the cash spigots.

As a "Bush Pioneer" in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election, Lay was a key member of the Bush campaign's fund-raising inner circle. Under Lay's leadership, Enron ultimately gave Bush $550,025, making the corporation the Texan's No. 1 career patron at the time the 2000 election campaign began, according to the Center for Public Integrity. Lay personally pumped almost $400,000 into Republican hard- and soft-money funds, while Enron slipped another $1.5 million into the GOP's soft-money cesspool.

But that was just the beginning. Lay sent a letter to Enron executives urging them to contribute to Bush's campaign. More than 100 of them -- including Skilling, a major Bush giver since 1993, when he cut his first $5,000 check to GW's gubernatorial campaign -- did just that. Dozens of spouses wrote, including "homemaker" and frequent $10,000 donor Linda Lay, gave as well, making the Enron "family" a prime source of the money that gave Bush his early advantage over Republican rivals such as Arizona Senator John McCain.

All told, it is estimated that, over the years prior the company's bankruptcy, Lay, his company and its employees contributed close to $2 million to fund George W. Bush's political rise.

Lay found other ways to help, as well. He put Enron's corporate jets at the disposal of the Bush campaign in 2000. He kicked in $5,000 to pay for the Florida recount fight, while a top Enron "consultant," former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, ran the Republican's recount effort. He even paid for his own bookkeeping, chipping in $1,000 to help the Bush-Cheney campaign comply with campaign-finance laws. And Lay and Enron gave $300,000 to underwrite the Bush-Cheney inauguration festivities in 2001.

Did all that giving pay off? You bet!

Lay cashed in even before Bush was sworn in as president, entering into the inner circles of the new administration and using the access he had paid for to craft its agenda on the issues that mattered most to Enron.

Bush took good care of his contributor-in-chief, appointing the Enron founder as one of five members of the elite "Energy Department Transition Team," which set the stage for the Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force and administration policies designed to benefit corporations such as Enron. A report on "Bush Administration Contacts with Enron," compiled at the request of Congressman Henry Waxman, D-California, by the minority staff of the Special Investigations Division of the House Committee on Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives, found evidence of at least 112 contacts between Enron and White House or other Administration officials during the month prior to the corporation's very-public collapse in late 2001. At least 40 of those contacts involved top White House officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, presidential advisor Karl Rove, White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey, White House personnel director Clay Johnson III, and White House energy task force director Andrew D. Lundquist.

As Waxman explained in a 2001 interview, "The fact of the matter is that Enron and Ken Lay, who was the Chief Executive Officer of Enron, had an extraordinary amount of influence and access to the Bush Administration. Lay was called a close friend by both the President and the Vice President. When the Vice President chaired an Energy Task Force, Ken Lay had an opportunity to meet privately with the Vice President and to have a great deal of influence in their recommendations."

Bush and his aides have worked hard since the Enron scandal broke to suggest that Lay was just another generous Texan. But the attempts to deny linkages to the now-convicted corporate criminal never cut water with Lone Star-state watchdog Craig McDonald, the director of Texans for Public Justice.

"President Bush's explanation of his relationship with Enron is at best a half truth," McDonald said after Bush first tried to distance himself from Lay and other Enron executives. "He was in bed with Enron before he ever held a political office."

As governor and president, Bush maintained that intimate relationship.

Now that his strange bedmate have been convicted of fraud, isn't it time for the president to end the fraud of claiming that he was ever anything less than a political partner of Lay and the Enron team?

(John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, has covered progressive politics and activism in the United States and abroad for more than a decade. Formerly a writer and editor for The Toledo Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspapers, he is now editorial page editor for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin.)


2. Rise and Fall of the Enron Boys -- by William Greider

Normally, I am a "bleeding heart" when it comes to long prison terms, but an appropriate sentence for the Enron boys might be six trillion years. Kenneth Lay with his million-dollar smile and Jeffrey Skilling with the cold, confident eyes of a viper made their company into the symbol and showpiece for a glorious era. It was the hyper-modern and market-efficient "new economy," in which the concept of wealth falling out of the sky became briefly hip and widely believed in respectable circles.

Enron led the way. Lay and Skilling showed us how it's done. And when Enron fell, the great national delusion turned to catastrophe. Unwitting investors lost $6 trillion overall. Millions of innocent bystanders lost much more in terms of their lives. So let Skilling and Lay now serve as symbol for the shame of modern American capitalism. Let these guys do the time for all those others, the corporate titans and financial con men, who got away.

Justice sometimes proceeds in strange ways. I am opposed to public hangings and other forms of scapegoating, but perhaps this time we need a spectacular ritual sacrifice to amplify the point made by that swift, sure conviction in Texas. These men in the good suits are criminals-- criminals! --who must be made to set an example for all ambitious people who toil in business and finance.

These two thugs looted pension funds and destroyed the personal savings of families. They stole money from the rest of us, not to mention from government and other non-glamorous business enterprises. They rigged energy markets to drive up prices and bilk defenseless consumers (an old-fashioned swindle borrowed from nineteenth-century robber barons and newly decriminalized by deregulation). They swallowed viable, productive companies and wrecked them, especially wrecking the livelihoods of their employees. And, worst of all, they were best pals with politicians and political leaders as well as the most prestigious names in banking and finance--connections the Mafia would die for!

Sorry, am I shouting? My exuberance over this verdict is a mixture of joyous fulfillment and lingering doubts about the impact. Since the meltdown of the stock market in 2001 and the avalanche of scandalous revelations that followed from hundreds of corporations, I have thought the political system and the financial system and even the public at large did not sufficiently get the message. The pervasive rot in American capitalism is much deeper than acknowledged. The various forms of fraud by which millions of people are separated from their money continue in practice, often blessed by law itself.

Still flourishing, likewise, are the leading Wall Street firms--Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, to name a few--that showed Lay and Skilling how to do the fancy financial footwork, converting "debt" into "revenue," so that stock analysts could tout Enron's rising "profit". This was fraud too, but nobody from the banks went to prison (they paid millions, even billions, for no-guilt settlements with government and injured investors). Message to America: Don't rob the Seven Eleven with a six-gun. Rob the general public with pen and computer.

Congress, meanwhile, claimed to "toughen" financial laws, but they did not get reform halfway done. Now the Chamber of Commerce and other front groups are back in Washington insisting that the rather mild reform measures be scrapped too. They may very well succeed, if the public is not aroused. The media can take care of that. They will be describing this verdict as "an end of the era."

Wrong again. That era of corporate corruption, financial swindling and blue-sky illusions is not over. The players are merely paused, waiting for the marks to re-enter the casino. Perhaps Kenny Boy's conviction will remind people that the game is still fixed and those guys in good suits are the dealers.


3. Bush's Enron Lies -- by Robert Parry

Four years ago, when the taboo against calling George W. Bush a liar was even stronger than it is today, the national news media bought into the Bush administration's spin that the President did nothing to bail out his Enron benefactors, including Kenneth Lay.

Bush supposedly refused to intervene, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Enron had poured into his political coffers. That refusal purportedly showed the high ethical standards that set Bush apart from lesser politicians.

Bush's defenders will probably reprise that storyline now that former Enron Chairman Lay and former Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling stand convicted of conspiracy and fraud in the plundering of the onetime energy-trading giant. But the reality is that the Bush-can't-be-bought spin was never true.

For instance, the documentary evidence is now clear that in summer 2001 - at the same time Bush's National Security Council was ignoring warnings about an impending al-Qaeda terrorist attack - NSC adviser Condoleezza Rice was personally overseeing a government-wide task force to pressure India to give Enron as much as $2.3 billion.

Then, even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when India's cooperation in the "war on terror" was crucial, the Bush administration kept up its full-court press to get India to pay Enron for a white-elephant power plant that the company had built in Dabhol, India.

The pressure on India went up the chain of command to Vice President Dick Cheney, who personally pushed Enron's case, and to Bush himself, who planned to lodge a complaint with India's prime minister. Post-9/11, one senior U.S. bureaucrat warned India that failure to give in to Enron's demands would put into doubt the future functioning of American agencies in India.

The NSC-led Dabhol campaign didn't end until Nov. 8, 2001, when the Securities and Exchange Commission raided Enron's offices - and protection of Lay's interests stopped being political tenable. That afternoon, Bush was sent an e-mail advising him not to raise his planned Dabhol protest with India's prime minister who was visiting Washington. [For details on the Dabhol case, see below.]

Contrary to the official story, the Bush administration did almost whatever it could to help Enron as the company desperately sought cash to cover mounting losses from its off-the-books partnerships, a bookkeeping black hole that was sucking Enron toward bankruptcy and scandal.

As Enron's crisis worsened through the first nine months of Bush's presidency, Lay secured Bush's help in three key ways:
Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity in California at a time when Enron was artificially driving up the price of electricity by manipulating supply. Bush's resistance to price caps bought Enron extra time to gouge hundreds of millions of dollars from California's consumers.

Bush granted Lay broad influence over the development of the administration's energy policies, including the choice of key regulators to oversee Enron's businesses. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was replaced in 2001 after he began to delve into Enron's complex derivative-financing schemes.

Bush had his NSC staff organize that administration-wide task force to pressure India to accommodate Enron's interests in selling the Dabhol generating plant for as much as $2.3 billion.

Bankruptcy

As Enron's corporate house of cards collapsed anyway in fall 2001, the toll was devastating. Investors lost tens of billions of dollars; some retirees were financially wiped out; 5,000 Enron employees were laid off. Enron's accounting tricks also discredited its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen LLP, which was soon closed by government regulators.

But Bush was fortunate that the Enron scandal broke while he was still wrapped in the glow of favorable poll ratings that followed the 9/11 attacks. The Washington news media generally acquiesced to Bush's insistence that he really wasn't that close to Enron or Lay, though Lay had earned a Bush nickname: "Kenny Boy."

The facts, however, suggest a political intimacy between Bush and Enron, especially with the now convicted swindler Ken Lay, dating back at least to Bush's first campaign for Texas governor in 1994.

By the 2000 presidential campaign, Lay was a Pioneer for Bush, raising $100,000. Enron also gave the Republicans $250,000 for the convention in Philadelphia and contributed $1.1 million in soft money to the Republican Party. Not only was Lay a top fund-raiser for the campaign, but he helped out during the recount battle in Florida in November 2000.

Lay and his wife donated $10,000 to Bush's Florida recount fund that helped pay for Republican lawyers and other expenses. Lay even let Bush operatives use Enron's corporate jet to fly in reinforcements. After Bush secured his victory, another $300,000 poured in from Enron circles - including $100,000 from Lay and $100,000 from Skilling - for the Bush-Cheney Inaugural Fund.

Yet, after the Enron scandal broke, Bush acted as if he barely knew Lay. On Jan. 11, 2002, Bush told reporters that Lay "was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994" for Texas governor, implying that he had gotten to know Lay as Gov. Richards' holdover appointee to a Texas business council.

The administration also claimed that it turned down Enron's bail-out pleas in late October 2001 when Lay sounded out senior Bush officials about overt financial help. By then, however, Enron's troubles were too advanced - and the public spotlight too intense - for the administration to launch a full-scale rescue mission out in the open.

Yet, before Enron went into its death spiral, the Bush administration did what it could, behind the scenes.

Gathering Storm

The Houston-based energy trader's financial crisis can be traced back to 2000 when the long-running stock market boom ended. During the boom, Enron had risen through the ranks of Fortune 500 companies to a perch at No. 7.

A leader of the so-called New Economy, Enron expanded beyond its core business interests in natural gas pipelines, branching out into complex commodity trading, which included electricity, broadband capacity and other ethereal items, such as weather futures.

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in March 2000 put pressure on Enron as it did many other companies. Even though Enron's stock held strong, hitting an all-time high of $90 a share on Aug. 17, 2000, the tumbling market and some risky overseas energy projects left Enron with many poor-performing assets.

To protect its image as a darling of Wall Street - and to prop up its stock value - Enron began shifting more of its losing operations into off-the-books partnerships given names like Raptor and Chewco. Hedges were set up to limit Enron's potential losses from equity investments, but some hedges were themselves backed by Enron stock, creating the possibility of a spiraling decline if investors lost faith in Enron.

Still, Enron saw a silver lining in the darkening economic clouds of 2000. A prospective George W. Bush victory could speed up Enron's deregulatory plans for the energy markets. Through energy trading in California alone, Enron stood to earn tens of billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, in summer 2000, the first signs of suspicions arose that Enron was trying to manipulate the California energy market.

An employee with Southern California Edison sent the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) a memo expressing concerns that Enron and other electricity providers to California's deregulated energy market were gaming the system by cutting off supply and creating phony congestion in the electricity grid to run up energy prices. [See Energy Daily, May 16, 2002]

By December 2000, Enron was implementing plans dubbed "Fat Boy," "Death Star" and "Get Shorty" to siphon electricity away from areas that needed it most and getting paid for phantom transfers of energy supposedly to relieve transmission-line congestion. [Washington Post, May 7, 2002]

That same month, after a 35-day battle over Florida's vote count, Bush nailed down his presidential victory by getting five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop a statewide recount.

Grateful Bush

Once in the White House, a grateful Bush gave Lay a major voice in shaping energy policy and picking personnel. Starting in late February 2001, Lay and other Enron officials took part in at least a half dozen secret meetings to develop Bush's energy plan.

After one of the Enron meetings, Vice President Cheney's energy task force changed a draft energy proposal to include a provision to boost oil and natural gas production in India. The amendment was so narrow that it apparently was targeted only to help Enron's troubled Dabhol power plant in India. [Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2002]

Other parts of the Bush energy plan also echoed Enron's views. Seventeen of the energy plan's proposals were sought by and benefited Enron, according to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. One proposal called for repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, which hindered Enron's potential for acquisitions.

Bush also put Enron's allies inside the federal government. Two top administration officials, Lawrence Lindsey, the White House's chief economic adviser, and Robert Zoellick, the U.S. Trade Representative, both worked for Enron, Lindsey as a consultant and Zoellick as a paid member of Enron's advisory board.

At least 14 administration officials owned stock in Enron, with Undersecretary of State Charlotte Beers and chief political adviser Karl Rove each reporting up to $250,000 worth of Enron stock when they joined the administration.

Lay exerted influence, too, over government regulators already in place. Curtis Hebert Jr., a conservative Republican and ally of Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., had been appointed to the FERC during the Clinton administration. Like Bush and Lay, Hebert was a promoter of "free markets," and Bush elevated him to FERC chairman in January 2001.

But Hebert ran into trouble when he broke ranks with Lay on Enron's plan to force consolidation of state utilities into four giant regional transmission organizations, or RTOs. By quickly pushing the states into RTOs, Enron and other big energy traders would have much larger markets for their energy sales.

Hebert, who advocated state rights, told the New York Times that he got a call from Lay with a proposed deal. Lay wanted Hebert to support a faster transition to a national retailing structure for electricity. If he did, Enron would back him to keep his job.

The FERC chairman said he was "offended" by the veiled threat. Lay already had demonstrated sway over selection of administration appointees by supplying Bush aides with a list of preferred candidates and personally interviewing a possible FERC nominee.

Lay offered a different account of the phone call. He said Hebert was the one "requesting" Enron's support, though Lay acknowledged that the pair "very possibly" discussed issues involving FERC's authority over the nation's electricity grids.

Hebert also raised Enron's ire when he started an investigation in early 2001 into how Enron's complex derivative financing instruments worked. "One of our problems is that we do not have the expertise to truly unravel the complex arbitrage activities of a company like Enron," Hebert said. [NYT, May 25, 2001]

At the time, those complex - and deceptive - derivative schemes were concealing Enron's worsening losses.

Energy Crisis

The California energy crisis also was spinning out of control. Rolling blackouts crisscrossed the state, where the partially deregulated energy market, served by Enron and other traders, had seen electricity prices soar 800 percent in one year.

After taking power, Bush turned a deaf ear to appeals from public officials in California to give the state relief from the soaring costs of energy. He also reined in federal efforts to monitor market manipulations.

As California's electricity prices continued to soar, Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced suspicions that the "free market" was not at work. Rather they saw corporate price-fixing, gouging consumers and endangering California's economy.

But California's suspicions mostly were mocked in official Washington as examples of finger-pointing and conspiracy theories. The administration blamed the problem on excessive environmental regulation that discouraged the building of new power plants.

Again, Lay was influencing policy behind the scenes. An April 2001 memo from Lay to Cheney advised the administration to resist price caps.

"The administration should reject any attempt to re-regulate wholesale power markets by adopting price caps or returning to archaic methods of determining the cost-base of wholesale power," Lay said. [San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 30, 2002]

Cheney and Bush echoed Lay's position in their political exchanges with Davis and other Democrats. On April 18, 2001, Cheney told the Los Angeles Times that the Bush administration opposed price caps because they would discourage investment. [L.A. Times, April 19, 2001]

In May 2001, Bush traveled to California on a trip choreographed like a President visiting a disaster area. Only this time, Bush wasn't promising federal help to a state in need. He was carrying the same message that Lay had sent to Cheney. In effect, Bush was saying: Read my lips. No price caps.

"Price caps do nothing to reduce demand, and they do nothing to increase supply," Bush said. [L.A. Times, May 30, 2001]

After weeks of standoff, as electricity prices stayed high and began spreading to other Western states, the political showdown ended on June 18, 2001. FERC approved limited price caps, a reversal prompted by Republican fears of a political backlash that could cost them seats in Congress. [L.A. Times, June 19, 2001]

Still, the administration's rear-guard defense of deregulation had bought Enron and other energy traders precious months to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in trading profits in California.

The imposition of FERC's limited price caps - and the state's aggressive conservation efforts - brought the energy crisis under control. That may have been good news for California, but not for Enron. By losing control over its ability to keep electricity prices artificially high, Enron faced new economic pressures.

"There are some hints of a connection [between the price caps and Enron's collapse], including the billions of dollars in cash that flowed in and out of Enron as the crisis waxed and waned," the New York Times reported later. [NYT, May 9, 2002]

With the easing of the California energy crisis, Enron's stock price began to decline, slipping from around $80 early in the year to the high-$40's. That began to put pressure on the stock hedges tucked inside the off-the-books partnerships.

The Dabhol Battle

In June 2001, the White House went to bat for Enron on another touchy issue, the natural gas power plant that Enron had built in Dabhol, India.

The plant had become something of a white elephant. Its cost of electricity was several times higher than what India was paying other providers, which led to an impasse over unpaid bills. Enron wanted India to pay $250 million for the electricity or buy out Enron's stake in the plant, worth about $2.3 billion.

These sorts of contract disputes between U.S. companies and foreign governments are normally handled by the Commerce Department or possibly the State Department. But Enron's Dabhol problem became a priority of Bush's National Security Council staff.

That level of interest over a contract dispute was almost unprecedented, according to former NSC officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations. The administration's intervention even involved direct appeals from top U.S. officials.

On June 27, 2001, Cheney personally discussed Enron's problem with Sonia Gandhi, the leader of India's opposition Congress Party. "Good news is that the Veep mentioned Enron in his meeting with Sonia Gandhi yesterday," said one NSC e-mail dated June 28, 2001. (I obtained this and other documents under a Freedom of Information Act request.)

Throughout summer 2001, while intelligence warnings about an expected al-Qaeda terror attack went unheeded, the NSC staff met frequently to coordinate U.S. pressure on India over Enron's plant, drawing in the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Office of U.S. Trade Representative and the Overseas Private Investment Corp., which had committed $360 million in risk insurance to the Dabhol project.

While the NSC held no follow-up meetings on the Aug. 6, 2001, intelligence warning entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice organized and led the "Dabhol Working Group."

The working group sought to broker meetings between Lay and senior Indian officials, including Brajesh Mishra, the national security adviser to Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. During a trip to India, a senior State Department official delivered a "demarche" or official warning to the Indian government, but New Delhi still resisted the U.S. pressure.

Also in the summer of 2001, Enron was consolidating its influence at FERC.

Nora Mead Brownell, a controversial member of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, was named as a new FERC commissioner. In support of Brownell's appointment, Lay called White House aide Karl Rove to say that Brownell "was a strong force in getting the right outcome" in deregulating Pennsylvania's energy market, according to a July, 17, 2001, letter by Rep. Waxman to the White House counsel.

Then, in August 2001, FERC Chairman Hebert, who had gone along with the California price caps and had ordered the inquiry into Enron's arbitrage schemes, abruptly resigned only six months into his four-year term. He clearly was forced out, explaining lamely that he desired "to seek other opportunities."

Bush replaced Hebert with former Texas Public Utilities commissioner Pat Wood III. Lay had included Wood and Brownell on a list of his preferred FERC candidates. [AP, Jan. 31, 2002]

Accounting Scandal

As Lay was flexing his political muscle in Washington, out of public view back in Houston, Enron's accounting house of cards was shaking. On Aug. 15, 2001, Sherron Watkins, an Enron vice president, warned Lay that accounting irregularities, including the hedges tied to Enron stock, were threatening to undo the corporation.

On Sept. 11, however, the course of George W. Bush's presidency took a sharp turn, as Islamic terrorists seized four U.S. airliners, crashing two into the World Trade towers at the heart of the U.S. financial markets. Another smashed into the Pentagon and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers apparently battled for control.

Bush vowed to retaliate for the attacks by waging a "war on terror," finally targeting Osama bin Laden and his protectors in Afghanistan, the Taliban government. On the front lines of that new war were Pakistan and India, traditional enemies who were engaged in a brush war over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Despite the New Delhi's importance in prosecuting the "war on terror," Enron's Dabhol power plant remained at the center of U.S. relations with India.

On Sept. 28, more than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the NSC-led Dabhol Working Group prepared "talking points" about the Enron business dispute for Cheney to deliver in a meeting with India's Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh.

On Oct. 7, the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan began with aerial assaults against Taliban targets.Two days later, on Oct. 9, the State Department was again pressing Enron's case with the Indians.

Undersecretary Alan Larson "raised the Dabhol issue with both FM Singh and NSA Mishra and got a commitment to 'try' to get the government energized on this issue prior to the PM's visit to Washington" in November, an Oct. 23 NSC e-mail said. "Pls give me one/two bullets for the President to use during his meeting with Vajpayee."

Meanwhile, Enron's financial situation was collapsing. Its credit rating was cut and its stock was falling. On Oct. 30, 2001, behind closed doors, SEC commissioners approved a formal investigation of Enron's accounting.

The NSC's Dabhol Working Group, however, continued to press for India to make concessions to Enron. On Nov. 1, the White House prepared a memo on Dabhol talking points that Bush could raise in his meeting with Prime Minister Vajpayee.

On Nov. 6, OPIC President Peter Watson sent a stern warning to Vajpayee's national security adviser Mishra. "The acute lack of progress in this matter has forced Dabhol to rise to the highest levels of the United States government," Watson said in a letter. The dispute "could have a negative effect regarding other U.S. agencies and their ability to function in India."

So, almost two months after 9/11 with the war against Afghanistan still being fought, the Bush administration was threatening India, a key regional power, with a pullout of U.S. agencies from India because it was refusing to meet Enron's demands for cash.

The Bush administration's pressure on India over Dabhol did not end until Nov. 8, the day the SEC delivered subpoenas to Enron and the company announced that it was under formal SEC investigation.

That same day, on Nov. 8 at 2:33 p.m., an internal administration e-mail warned that "President Bush can not talk about Dabhol" in his meeting with India's prime minister.

As Enron slid into scandal and bankruptcy, White House officials stressed that the administration had rebuffed a couple of last-minute overtures for a bail-out from Lay, including one to Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. Those rejections, administration spokesmen claimed, proved the mettle of Bush's integrity, not letting politics influence policy.

In early 2002, when OPIC officials released documents on the Dabhol Task Force, Bush's aides dismissed their significance. On Jan. 18, 2002, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer called the Dabhol effort "not uncommon."

But the available evidence makes clear that the Dabhol operation - like other energy-related initiatives - represented extraordinary efforts to save Enron. Bush even put Enron's financial interests at the top of the administration's agenda with India, though it threatened to complicate relations with a key South Asian power after 9/11.

The White House also appears to have taken to task OPIC officials who released the internal e-mails in a normal response to a Freedom of Information Act request. When I sought more Enron documents under FOIA, a shaken OPIC bureaucrat told me that his agency had been perhaps too cooperative in releasing the earlier records.

All future Enron-related releases from the Bush administration amounted to boilerplate and documents that were already in the public domain.

(Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com . It's also available at Amazon.com , as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & "Project Truth.")


4. Enron's Schemes "The Very Nature of Profit-Based, Market Capitalism" -- by Wallace Roberts

Despite the conviction of a couple of bad apples at Enron, its top management is not the real culprit in this case. The real culprit is a bad idea: deregulation of the natural gas and electric power industries.

Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, the former chairman and CEO respectively, can be said to be just "sharp traders," businessmen who did what the free market demands of rational players: take advantage of every loophole they could find to make a profit.

Early in 2004, Jacqueline Lang Weaver, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, wrote, "In competitive electricity markets, participants can exploit legal loopholes or use market power to make millions of dollars in profits in a very short time period, and there is every reason to expect them to do so; it is the very nature of profit-based, market capitalism."

Enron played a unique role in deregulation, Weaver said, and the company’s subsequent collapse was, in some important respects, a product of its genius in creating "a business model that tracked the opening of deregulated energy markets…and was accompanied by a powerful and well-financed political lobbying arm that worked to push government regulation out of the markets."

This point was echoed earlier this month when Robert McCullough, an independent analyst of the electric power industry who is a consultant to many of the agencies that were victims of Enron’s trading schemes, testified before the U.S. Senate Policy Committee and described in detail the consequences of what he called "an unfortunate policy decision" made by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in 1993.

"At the urging of Enron and other energy companies," he said, "CFTC relinquished control of energy-based forward transactions…The purpose of Enron’s various market manipulation schemes was to promote an increase in long term prices—an increase that returned over a billion dollars in earnings on an enormous forward position that Enron accumulated just before the onset of the Western [California] Market Crisis."

McCullough did not mention that the CFTC’s 1993 decision was made at the urging of its chairwoman, Wendy Gramm, who is an economist and the wife of then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas. Almost immediately after the vote of the commission to forego regulating electricity trading, Mrs. Gramm resigned from the commission and joined the board of Enron where she remained until just after the bankruptcy in 2001.

Another key aspect of the Enron story described by both McCullough and Weaver is the role of EnronOnline, which handled nearly one-quarter of all gas and electric trades by the end of the 1990’s, making it the largest e-commerce system in the world.

Weaver said EnronOnline did not match up buyer and seller for a fee like most commodity trading exchanges. Instead the company was a counterparty to each trade, meaning that it bought products for sale if the price was right and then re-sold them, a business strategy that requires billions of dollars in cash to handle the float.

This need for large amounts of cash for trading, she said, combined with some disastrous deals in hard assets like building a huge power plant in India and overpaying for a water utility in England, neither of which generated any cash flow, sent the company far into debt. It was Enron’s use of the accounting gimmicks called Special Purpose Entities to keep this debt off its books that finally caused the bankruptcy.

Weaver concludes her report by saying that the darker side of the market system is that it is controlled by and primarily benefits two "power elites…the elected political elite and the managerial elite that control business enterprises. However, between the two, corporations have the upper hand, because they must be induced with incentives to produce and provide jobs and tax revenues to society. The corporate elite have a privileged position of power in the political system, and political leaders will act to provide business with whatever it says it needs to do its job."

The ultimate danger, she said, of this "enormous influence of the business elite on the legislative policies at all levels of government seriously distorts the democratic nature of our society."

And the ultimate irony is that Enron collapsed by choking on the apple of deregulation which it tried to swallow whole, and that Lay and Skilling, the corporate cheerleaders for deregulation, are victims of their own delusion.

(Wallace Roberts is an independent journalist writing on public policy issues. His work on deregulation of the electric power industry was assisted by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.)