The Enron Uproar

by Alexander Cockburn

Of course Democrats can be forgiven their malicious glee. After years of battering over Whitewater, Chinese influence peddling, Monica, Travelgate, etc., they now enjoy a scandal of epic proportions in which the prime players are: Texan Republicans who were big-time contributors to George Bush; plus a company whose executives were somehow able to locate Vice President Dick Cheney and met with him no less than six times, the time required to dictate the new administration's energy policy. (They spared Cheney the fierce lobbying for the Kyoto treaty that had been an Enron staple of the Clinton years. The company regarded Kyoto as an opportunity to coin money off natural gas sales, pollution credits and Enron's cornering of the solar and wind power technologies.)

The newsletter CounterPunch, which I coedit with Jeffrey St. Clair, has been following Enron's rampages for years. Indeed, back in 1996, we were in receipt of a phone call from an Enron vice president protesting our expose of how Enron, with the connivance of green energy guru Ralph Cavanagh, was plotting to take over Oregon's prime utility, Portland Gas Electric. The Enron veep bleated that CounterPunch had got it all wrong and that they are "the good guys who will cut red tape, lower energy prices, move away from nukes, coal and other environmentally malign power sources and look out for the poor in the cold winter months as part of our charitable duties. Five years from now we will have revolutionized the energy market."

Enron's successful grab of PGE told us everything we needed to know about the Houston-based company. Its promises were baloney, its motives and methods corrupt. Whenever it could, it simply bought off the opposition. Green groups would pocket the grants and in an instant detect beneficence in Enron's strategies. Enron had no loyalties, displaying a mature understanding of the political process. It invested in George Bush in the late 1980s. In 1994, it was equally ready to invest in Sheila Jackson Lee. When this Texas Democrat made her first primary challenge her finance chairman was Ken Lay.

Thus we can pardon Democratic schadenfreude, but also relish the hypocrisies involved. The itinerary and mechanics of Enron's rise and fall were both designed in the Clinton years, where the Clinton/Gore White House oversaw and often micro-managed the deregulatory legislation and ExIm Bank/ OPIC financing that were key to Enron's expansion. The Democratic National Committee feed their favored columnists with choice nuggets about Enron/Republican ties, such as Dick Cheney's activities as debt collector for Enron from the Indian government. The Republican rapid response teams fire back press releases to the effect that not only did the Clinton administration exert itself with equal energy to collect India's debt to Enron but actually midwifed the original project: the construction of dams on the Narmada river, scheduled to displace 400,000 people in the central Indian state of Maharashtra.

Sure, James Baker was on the Enron payroll, as was George Bush's economic adviser Larry Lindsay. But also taking Lay's money were two of Gore's closest advisors, Jack Quinn and Greg Simon. And when Campaign 2002 was over, one of the first onto the Enron ship as one of the company's lobbyists was Michael Lewan, who had served previously as Senator Joe Lieberman's chief of staff. And let us not forget that as Enron writhed in its death throes last December, among those urgently calling the White House in search of rescue was Robert Rubin, Clinton's treasury chief.

Enron, it's true, did push the envelope. A PGE executive confided recently that "we knew the company was listing when we heard that it was trying to buy Internet porn sites." Even by the usual standards of corporate chicanery, the accounting procedures were manic in their crookedness. But the basic recipe was entirely in sync with what we are regularly instructed on CNN, MSNBC and Forbes is the building code for the New Economy of the 21st Century: The Marketability of More or Less Everything on the e-Bay of Planet Earth.

For those who grew up in the rhetorical wonderland of the Nineties boom, Enron illustrates bleakly what New Age techno-speak adds up to. "Twenty-Five Years of Boom, Got A Problem With That?" blared the front page of Wired sometime in the late 1990s. Enron is the grave marker for that kind of delirious nonsense.

There was one major figure and one political force that did call Enron right, from the very start. Ralph Nader and his allies did battle with Enron in Oregon, in California and across the world. The feistier greens were never taken in. The advocates of public power saw through Enron's babble about the new energy economy. They were right all along.