Everywhere we look, it's Enron, in the biggest tumult over
corporate criminality since the looting of the S&Ls in the 1980s. Enron will
be on the menu for months, if not years. Congress launches into at least
eight separate hearings. Federal and state prosecutors prepare indictments.
The press marshals, investigative teams and columnists inscribe earnest
reflections about the necessity for capitalism to be honest about its
balance sheets. My favorite thus far: an article in Reason magazine (a
journal of the libertarian right) shouldering a heavy burden of argument to
the effect that the evaporation of the life savings of Enron workers, locked
in their doomed 401Ks, should in no way slow the effort to privatize the
social security system.
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.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
