3/18/2002
Here is the centerpiece of what has changed on the US political scene in the last few months--and thank heaven for that, because it's also about the only thing that's not according to government plan. If there was any antidote for the 9/11 effect, the mass hysteria, the wilful blindness and uncritical, anticritical enthusiasm for every mad impulse of the still unelected but newly sainted George W. Bush, the catastrophic collapse of the tower of fraud that was Enron was that antidote. All the dissent that has begun to make itself heard, all the outcry against our mad rampage, was simmering since the war began. Enron seems to have functioned as permission for the dissenters to speak. It was too big to ignore. We're still finding out how big it is.
I was going to put together an Enron weblog, for reference, to be used by anybody, like myself, who was late in asking what the fuss was about. But then, like a good little proto-geek, I went online and found somebody else's instead. In fact I found four or five of them.
Here, to add my own gloss, is what matters about Enron. They were huge and they were crooked, first; crooked companies are old hat, and "big company cooks the books" is not a new story, but big company buys every politician in sight and thereby bloats into a national mainstay even though it can't seem to make a single good investment in the world except for the purchasing of politicians--that's kind of egregious. Some point out that GE has been at this for ages, as have other corporations before, but Enron matters if for no other reason than that it owns a controlling share of stock in the current crop of sitting politicians. Its whole business is buying the law. Bush has belonged to Enron for most of his adult life, traceable with reasonable certainty as far back as 1986, and he's implicated up to his neck in its rise and fall. It gets hard to tell who's a politician and who's an Enron exec; the Secretary of the Army came to office fresh from years as an Enron suit, except it seems he didn't quite manage to disentangle himself from Enron financially until well after he was in office. Phil Gramm's wife sits on the Enron board of directors. And when you look at campaigns, it's an absolute landslide--Enron has paid for the votes of pretty much everyone in Congress and everyone in the state of Texas and everyone in the White House. This guy's amusing site documents Enron's tight and long-standing control over the Republican party in Texas, but he misses the point--Enron didn't just buy Republicans, it bought both parties. Bush defended himself not long ago by pointing out--quite accurately--that Enron had given a huge sum of money to his opponent in his last gubernatorial race in Texas; he just didn't mention (what, did he really think nobody would check?) that it still wasn't nearly as much as it contributed to his campaign in the very same race.
Pause for a sec to work that out fully. Enron constantly contributed lavish sums to the campaigns of opposing politicians in the same race. Why? Not to win the election for their preferred candidate--though one candidate in a given race always got a larger chunk of money than any other, and the margin of difference could be said to have been their actual bid to affect the outcome.
But the sum that each candidate got can't have influenced the election--it canceled out. Why do it? Not to push a candidate, but to hedge their bets--to buy a sense of indebtedness from the winner, no matter who the winner might be. That's why there are so many Democrats in Congress with a debt to Enron, even though Enron prefers Republicans. Theoretical party philosophies are all well and good, but Enron wanted individual votes, and that's what it was actually buying. Its money is a significant pressure on Democrats, too, not to make much legislative trouble for Enron, because they are addicted, one and all, to those campaign goodies when it comes re-election time. And re-election time always comes, since politicians are always desperate to stay in office. No matter what. Even if winning it effectively costs them their politics.
Here's how deep Enron was in policy: CEO Kenneth Lay spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom under the administration of President Bush (repeat visitors will remember that I use these words to refer to the legitimately elected George Herbert Walker Bush), and had a regular correspondence with George W. who called him Kenny Boy. Of that correspondence this is a particularly interesting bit. Enron's phrasings and precise preferences in energy policy are routinely echoed by the White House soon after he suggests them. And though Enron execs are known to have slipped in the back door of the White House to dictate energy policy to Dick Cheney, Cheney snarlingly refuses to divulge even their identities to anyone--even Congress, to whom he is damn well beholden whether he likes it or not--citing, as has become depressingly predictable, some "principle" of rights and privileges accruing to his office that he just then made up. (Here's a good article on that.) Bush has since taken up the baton of flipping Congress the finger when asked for disclosure.
At least Enron has us finally awake and questioning--too many ordinary Joes got taken to the financial cleaners' by their collapse, while the execs (those would be the cleaners) bailed out of the company with millions upon millions of dollars, much of it gotten by grossly illegal insider trading--the company advised employees to buy stock even as the execs who knew what was happening frantically sold theirs--anyway we won't forgive that, and we won't let it slide, and Congress has understood that well enough to turn around and badger the white House unusually closely. Are we done? We may not even have the measure of it yet. Lay had the temerity, while taking the fifth on Capitol Hill, to ask in the same breath that this not be regarded as any sign of guilt; most of us are not quite so credulous, at least not just at the moment. Some say we know as much about Enron right now as the people knew about Watergate before the scandal broke.
Congress, though, is still being far too passive. The last president was dragged, along with the entire governmental apparatus, through a gruelling impeachment, theoretically for the sake of a dirty real estate deal in Arkansas (which probably happened) but in practice supported by nothing but the details of pathetically insignificant sexual peccadilloes with some girl at the office.
For this, we impeach a president. For being owned by a corporation, and shaping policy to suit that corporation in flagrant disregard of the best interests of the general populace--that, we are seemingly prepared to overlook. At least we'll let it slide in view of the redeeming qualities of hair-raising aggression, open xenophobia, and human-rights abuse on a grand scale.