More poop on Bush/Enron-gate

[Roger Baker]

[I sense a new lefty political consensus, or a simplified unified field
theory of politics, shaping up somewhat along the lines described
below. It may not be entirely true, but its still close enough to sell
tickets at the box office-- Roger]



FYI: Enron/Bush connection detail.
http://www.willpitt.com/WillPitt.htm

"Greetings. My name is William Rivers Pitt. I am a writer/teacher
from Boston, Massachusetts. For the last two years, I have been
writing essays about the buildup to, catastrophe of, and fallout from
the 2000 Presidential election. The best of these are listed along
the left side of the main page. My most profound thanks to all of
 the websites who graciously published my work."

Hell to Pay
  "Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a
        fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

                    - Samuel Johnson

Some time just before January 7th, 2002, an asteroid capable of
pulverizing a good-sized nation flashed through the void, passing
perilously close to Earth. Had it struck our planet, the impact would
have had global consequences. The energy of the strike would have
been equivalent to the explosion of a number of large atomic
weapons. From the media perspective, it would have been the
biggest story since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

At some point in the next six months, a small, darkened corner of
George W. Bush's consciousness will wish the thing had hit us. The
apocalypse he and his fundamentalist buddies have been waiting for
would have been at hand, and a number of potentially calamitous
questions about to be put to his administration would have been
avoided.

Sadly for him, the planet spins on. Beneath the unpierced
stratosphere, the electronic beams of news agencies like CNN and
the Associated Press have begun to spread like a widow's web from
city to city and house to house. Carried on this invisible wind are
rumors of doom, negligence and greed. Each and every one of
these rumors lead inexorably back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,
which will soon be issuing significant numbers of visitor passes to
lawyers if the pattern holds much longer.

Whichever part of the nation that never heard of the energy giant
Enron Corporation has recently been introduced to the company in
odious context. The story thus far is nothing less than astounding:
Enron, a company valued in the billions on Wall Street, suddenly filed
for the largest bankruptcy claim in the history of the known universe.
4,000 employees were abruptly shown the door after having been
barred from dumping the company stock, meant to fund their
retirement, while it was worth something. Meanwhile, Enron
executives in the know were able to dump the stock, back when it
was the gold standard on the Street, for a cool $1 billion.

Apparently, Enron was ailing for quite a long time. The
aforementioned executives were able to maintain the mirage of
financial viability by stuffing the debt into what are called
'off-balance-sheet partnerships.' In essence, each of the executives
built personal banking bunkers and hid what has been revealed to
be staggering Enron debts within them, keeping fact that the
company was hemorrhaging money off the publicly displayed
balance sheets. This maintained the company's credit rating, and
allowed it to continue doing business.

This went on for four years, which means several things. It means
most of the Enron executives were aware of and/or actively
participating in this highly criminal and irresponsible activity. It means
the stockholders, including 4,000 loyal Enron employees, were lied
to. It probably means that the executives knew the stock value was
doomed when they bailed out and cashed in several months ago. It
means they let their employees lose the retirement funds they
believed were growing within their Enron stock portfolios. It means a
lot of people got screwed by a pack of sharp operators who didn't
give a damn about anyone but themselves.

All this could simply be chalked up as yet another story of corporate
greed run amok, until the umbilical political and financial connections
between Bush and Enron are illuminated. Enron's capo, Kenneth
Lay, was perhaps the best financial friend George W. Bush has ever
known. Lay and a number of Enron employees essentially bankrolled
Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign, going so far as to lend Bush an
Enron corporate jet for trips between whistle stops. Before Bush got
White House stars in his eyes, he worked very closely with Enron on
energy policy in Texas.

This close connection led to the Bush administration's hiring of a
number of influential individuals within Enron's orbit for important
government positions:

- Thomas E. White, Bush's Secretary of the Army, was once
Vice-Chairman of Enron Energy Service, and held millions in Enron
stock;

- Presidential Advisor Karl Rove owned as much as $250,000 in
Enron stock;

- Economic adviser Larry Lindsay leapt straight from Enron to his
current White House job;

- Federal Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick did the same;

- SEC Chairman Harvey Pitts was hand-picked by Kenneth Lay for
the position, due to his notorious aversion to governmental
regulation of any kind.

There are some thirty one Bush administration officials who had a
line item for Enron in their stock portfolio, including Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It is fair to say that the woebegone
corporation held, and continues to hold, enormous influence over the
day-to-day machinations of Federal government policy. One wonders
if Bush's recent gutting of the Clean Air Act, a decision designed to
improve the fortunes of companies like Enron, was the brainchild of
people with deep connections to the energy industry.

The trail of influence left by Enron leads also to the scabrous heart
ventricles of Vice President Dick Cheney, who admitted recently to six
separate meetings with Enron executives while formulating the Bush
administration's energy policy. Cheney, a former executive of the
Halliburton Petroleum interest, was in charge of creating this policy.
For reasons soon to be exposed by subpoena, Cheney refused to
detail the specifics of the creation of this policy, which included the
multiple Enron meetings.

The General Accounting Office was preparing to sue Cheney to
reveal this information when the September 11th attacks took place.
Those subpoenas may be dusted off and mailed within a month. In
the meantime, the Justice Department is preparing a serious criminal
investigation into the collapse of Enron. The Democratically-controlled
Senate is planning hearings on the matter as well. Columnist Robert
Scheer has referred to the Bush administration's involvement in the
Enron debacle as "Whitewater in spades." One wonders if "Watergate"
would be a more appropriate comparison.

Bush's own dealings within the energy industry carry a disturbingly
familiar echo to the Enron situation: once upon a time, he was a
high-ranking officer of a petroleum interest called Harken Oil. On
June 22, 1990, Bush sold his Harken stock and made $848,560,
earning him a 200% profit. One week later, Harken announced a
$23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings and its stock dropped sharply,
losing 60 percent of its value over the next six months. Bush made a
bundle while the other investors lost millions. Harken was Enron in
miniature, and might have served as a warning to the American
people if the press had chosen to pay any attention to it during the
2000 Presidential campaign.

There is a school of thought, espoused primarily by Republicans, that
any investigation into potentially dishonorable or illegal actions by the
Bush administration is tantamount to treason. We are at war,
undeclared though it may be, and Bush must be free to prosecute
this war vigorously, so as to defend our freedom and bring the
murderers of American civilians to justice. If reports recently aired on
CNN have any credence, however, Bush and his people may well
have to answer for actions that make the Enron catastrophe look like
a jaywalking offense, actions that led directly to the incredible
carnage in New York and Washington, D.C.

In 1998, during the Clinton administration, the U.S.-based energy
concern Unocal canceled plans to exploit massive natural gas
deposits in Turkmenistan. They had planned to run a pipeline from
Turkmenistan to Pakistan, where the natural gas could have been
processed for Asian and Western energy markets. The idea was
scuttled after Clinton ordered the cruise missile bombing of
Afghanistan in response to a terrorist attack upon U.S. embassies in
Africa which were planned and executed by Osama bin Laden. The
pipeline would have had to pass through Afghanistan, and Unocal
was given the message in Technicolor by Clinton's people that
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was not to be given any sort of
financial boon.

Apparently, the Bush administration found no moral dilemma in
dealing with the Taliban to get to the gas. Immediately upon their
arrival in Washington, a vigorous courtship of the Taliban was
undertaken by Bush's people. In fact, if former U.N. weapons
inspector Richard Butler is to be believed, the Bush administration
had a vested interest in strengthening and stabilizing the Taliban
regime, because a stable regime would compel investors to revive
the Turkmenistan natural gas pipeline deal. The Taliban, demon of
the moment, was the Bush administration's idea of a 'stable'
government. Stable enough, anyway, to see the pipeline through.

The connections between Bush and the Taliban became so close
that the Taliban went so far as to hire an expert on U.S. public
relations named Laila Helms, so as to smooth the way between the
two regimes. Meetings between the two nations continued at a high
level, the last of which occurred in August, scant weeks before the
September 11th attacks. All of these actions were taken to exploit
the vast energy reserves in Turkmenistan for the benefit of American
energy corporations.

The cozy relationship between Bush and the Taliban frustrated the
investigative efforts of former Deputy Director of the FBI John O'Neill.
O'Neill was the FBI's chief bin Laden hunter, in charge of the
investigations into the bin Laden-connected bombings of the World
Trade Center in 1993, the destruction of an American troop barracks
in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the African embassy bombings in 1998, and
the attack upon the U.S.S. Cole in 2000.

O'Neill quit the FBI in protest two weeks before the destruction of the
World Trade Center towers. He did so because his investigation was
hindered by the Bush administration's connections to the Taliban,
and by the interests of American petroleum companies. O'Neill was
quoted as stating, "The main obstacles to investigating Islamic
terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests, and the role played by
Saudi Arabia in it." After leaving the FBI, O'Neill took a position as
head of security for the World Trade Center. He died on September
11th, 2001, trying to save people trapped by the attack, when the
towers came down on top of him. The irony in this, simply, is
horrifying.

In essence, the Federal agent who knew more about bin Laden than
any living American was kept from investigating terrorist threats
against this country. He was hindered because the Bush
administration was desperate to cultivate the favor of the Taliban,
who held terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden in great esteem, so
as to gain access to lucrative natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan.

If these allegations prove true, Bush and his friends allowed this
affinity to hamstring investigations that could have thwarted bin
Laden's September plans. If these allegations prove true, everything
since September 11th has been a massive cover-up operation in
which American soldiers and thousands of Afghan civilians have
died. If these allegations prove true, the Bush administration has the
blood of thousands of American civilians on its hands.

If these allegations carry even the faintest whiff of credibility, George
W. Bush and members of his administration stand in taint of high
treason and murder.

On November 7th, 2000, a clear majority of Americans came to the
conclusion that George W. Bush was unfit to govern this nation. For
a variety of dark and controversial reasons, that conclusion was
thrown over. Sometime soon, if the media's electronic web continues
to carry these sordid stories of corruption, greed and death, the
American people will come to fully understand the consequences of
that failed election.

It is one thing to coddle and court a corrupt energy company for
political and financial gain. It is quite another to coddle and court a
murderous terrorist-supporting regime, hindering anti-terrorism
investigations in the process, for the purpose of exploiting valuable
natural resources. The former cost a number of people their
retirement funds. The latter has cost thousands of people their lives.
One is criminal. The other is abominable. George W. Bush is deeply
implicated in both. There will be hell to pay.