Stop Blaming Bush for Enron

[ImTyping]

<< Let the enron debacle be investigated, and the chips fall where they may. I doubt that President Bush (or any other political figure for that matter) will be shown to have committed wrongdoing. >>



hehe.

Let's see here...5 quick facts about the Bush/Enron ties...some of these coming out in the last week:

1. Bush lies about his relationship with Ken Lay (Lay gave bush over 100k in his last governor race, Lay gives Richards 12,000 bucks and Bush tells you that "Lay supported Richards" in his last campaign in Texas.

2. Jeb Bush says he is "the CEO" of the state of Florida. The state tries to prop up Enron by purchasing huge amounts of stock as it's price plummets. The stock gets sold for about a penny on the dollar. Bush denies responsibility. Suddenly the "CEO" is not responsible?

3. Dick Cheney meets with Sonia Gandhi and tells her that "the full weight and force" of the US government is behind him when he tells her that India must pay it's debts to Enron.

4. Ken Lay gets to help hand-pick the newest director of FERC, and sits in on the Energy policy meetings in the White House. Cheney refuses to hand over papers that outline what happened in those meetings.

5. The highest-level executive in Enron that protested the "crooked dealings" of the company (and who could have fingered anyone in the Bush White house) is suddenly found dead. To quote the Church Lady: "How conveeeeeeeeeeeenient."

And lastly, did anyone see that swill called "The Real West Wing" the other night? I howled when Ari Fleischer said that everyone could go home since they felt they had successfully spun the Enron affair as a "business" story and not a "political" story. I did not know they could pile it that high, Ari.

 

[Infos]

I love it when repubs are crying the blues

I say impeach GW

that would be true justice

 

[XMan]

The bailout woulda saved the employees of enron from losing their entirement retirement fund.

Doubt it. As soon as the word hit they were being bailed out by the government, their stock would have done a gainer.

Why doesn't anybody ever bring up the fact that the employees didn't diversify their 401Ks? You NEVER put all your eggs in one basket.

 

[SuperTool]

Nobody is blaming Bush.
Nod Nod

 

[Pabster]

Yeah, I mean, it must have been Bush himself who kept encouraging employees to buy more company stock. And it had to have been Bush who told them not to diversify, but to put every egg in the same basket.

Get real people. Accusing Bush in the Enron fiasco is ridiculous. It just goes to show how hungry those Dumbocrats are for something to attack Bush on. After all, it has been just too quiet in Washington without a new, sleazy sex scandal on a daily basis.

 

[ImTyping]

Enron for Dummies.
From the NYT:


<< January 26, 2002





Enron for Dummies

By BILL KELLER

saw this week that President Bush is `outraged' by the Enron scandal, and I know I should be too, but there's a lot I still don't get. For starters, what kind of company is Enron, exactly?

Enron is a new-economy company, a thinking-outside-the-box, paradigm-shifting, market-making company. In fact, it ranked as the most innovative company in America four years in a row, as judged by envious corporate peers in the annual Fortune magazine poll. It is also, at this point in time, a bankrupt company.

I meant, what does Enron do?

"Do?" Ah, a quaint old-economy question. You're probably one of those people who like the new no-cell- phone cars on Amtrak. Enron does a lot of things, but mainly it buys and sells energy.

What's so innovative about that?

When Enron got started, natural gas and electricity were produced, transmitted and sold by state-regulated monopolies. They were often plodding and inefficient. Enron used Wall Street magic to transform energy supplies into financial instruments that could be traded online like stocks and bonds. These contracts guaranteed customers a steady supply at a predictable price. This may be a good place to pause for an Enron Lesson. The company did stupid and venal things, but introducing the laws of supply and demand into the energy system was smart business and is, by and large, good for customers. One sad side effect of this scandal is that some good ideas may be discredited by association with Enron.




Join a Discussion on Bill Keller's Columns




More Op-Ed Columns

E-mail: billkeller@nytimes.com








So where did Enron go wrong?

As often happens with buccaneering entrepreneurs, it got a case of hubris. It figured if it could trade energy, it could trade anything, anywhere, in the new virtual marketplace. Newsprint. Television advertising time. Insurance risk. High- speed data transmission. All of these were converted into contracts ? called derivatives ? that were sold to investors. Enron poured billions into these trading ventures, and some failed. It turned out Enron was good at inventing businesses, but terrible at the tedious work of running them, judging by some appalling internal management audits discovered by The Times's Kurt Eichenwald. For a time, Enron swept its failures into creative hiding places, but ultimately the truth came out, confidence in the company collapsed and you now have a feeding frenzy.

How did it hide its mistakes?

To keep its mystique alive and its stock price growing, it set up partnerships where it could bury its losses, or generate imaginary revenues. Here's one of the more audacious examples, pieced together by The Wall Street Journal: Enron invested a bunch of money in a joint venture with Blockbuster to rent out movies online. The deal flopped eight months later. But in the meantime Enron had secretly set up a partnership with a Canadian bank. The bank essentially lent Enron $115 million in exchange for Enron's profits from the movie venture over its first 10 years. The Blockbuster deal never made a penny, but Enron counted the Canadian loan as a nice, fat profit.

Um, I'm not sure I follow that . . .

Neither did the Canadian bank, which now holds a lot of worthless Enron i.o.u.'s. Enron also seems to have baffled the accountants at Arthur Andersen, the bankers at J. P. Morgan, the Wall Street geniuses who touted Enron stock, and those C.E.O.'s who kept voting Kenneth Lay, now abruptly retired, the mastermind of the year. Also (with some exceptions) the business press.

Did Enron break the rules?

Whether it broke the law is yet to be determined. Various prosecutors are undoubtedly reviewing the statutes on accounting fraud, insider trading and illegal destruction of documents, among other crimes. But rules were for sissies. These were invincible innovators, who sneered at rules. In that respect, they were the quintessential 90's company.

What's that supposed to mean?

The company embodied the get- obscenely-rich-quick cult that grew up around the intersection of digital technology, deregulation and globalization. It rode the zeitgeist of speed, hype, novelty and swagger. Petroleum was hopelessly uncool; derivatives were hot. Companies were advised to unload the baggage of hard assets, like factories or oilfields, which hold you back in the digital long jump, and concentrate on buzz and brand. Accountants who tried to impose the traditional discipline of the balance sheet were dismissed as "bean-counters," stuck in the old metrics. Wall Street looked to new metrics, new ways of measuring the intangible genius of innovation, and the most important metrics were the daily flickers of your stock price. Above all, everyone was looking for the killer app.

Killer app?"

You are clueless. The killer application was the world-beating opportunity. (Mr. Lay called that Blockbuster deal "the killer app for the entertainment industry.") As often as not, the killer app was not a new product or service, but a beautiful loophole. In the new- economy best seller "Unleashing the Killer App," the first example is a guy who realizes that gas stations in Germany are exempt from the country's rigid early-closing laws for most stores. Voila! German gas stations become virtual shopping malls. By the way, in the 90's, expressions like "killer app" were widely believed to have an aphrodisiac effect.

So it was about sex, after all?

Oh, absolutely. Wall Street was the new Hollywood, risk was the new testosterone, Lou Dobbs was Leonardo DiCaprio. Accountants called themselves consultants and bought Miata convertibles. And how cool was Enron? About two years ago a Fortune magazine writer likened utilities and energy companies to "a bunch of old fogies and their wives shuffling around halfheartedly to the not-so-stirring sounds of Guy Lombardo. . . . Suddenly young Elvis comes crashing through the skylight." In this metaphor, the guy in the skin-tight gold-lam&eacute; suit was Enron. The writer left out the part where Elvis eats himself to death.

That reminds me, is it true what they say about the name "Enron"?

Mr. Lay wanted to call it Enteron, until they realized that was a biology term for the digestive tract. In hindsight, Enteron seems right for a company of such ungoverned appetites. Though I prefer my wife's name for the company: End Run.

Did Enron buy political influence?

Please. That's not the way things work in Washington. Enron bought access. Money just got it in the door to make its case. (The case it made probably went something like this: If the government does things Enron's way a lot of people will get very rich and they will be very, very grateful to the wise leaders who made it all possible.) If you're asking whether the Bush administration did favors for Enron, sure it did ? and so, by the way, did the Clinton administration, and both parties in Congress. Attention has focused on a number of fascinating loopholes lawmakers and regulators secretly customized for Enron. But ? and here's another Enron Lesson ? most of what Washington contributed to the glory of Enron it did in plain sight. Politicians demonized government regulation, and methodically dismantled the safeguards set up in previous downturns to protect little investors. They promoted the cult of stock-market speculation, even calling for Social Security funds to be fed to Wall Street. They cut taxes and all but stopped auditing tax returns. I'd say Enron's campaign donations, about $6 million over the past dozen years, paid off better than most of its other investments.

Isn't that what free markets are all about ? getting government out of the way?


Yes and no. Free-marketers believe in reducing regulation. Enron believed in reducing regulation of Enron. Enron was perfectly capable of lobbying for the federal government to take over the electric power grid from the states ? hardly a free-market position, but one that would have made life easier for Enron. It lobbied for tighter regulation of air pollution, because it had figured a way to make money trading emission credits. And at the end Enron sure seemed to be fishing for a bailout. More important, a central tenet of capitalism is that people who run companies are subject to the discipline of the marketplace, as meted out by the shareholders. That can't work if the shareholders are lied to about the condition of the company. Another Enron Lesson: The louder someone yells "free markets!" the closer you want to look at his files (assuming they have not been shredded).

But the administration didn't bail out Enron at the end, right?

No, the administration declined to climb aboard that sinking ship. A final Enron Lesson: When business and politics meet, Kenny Boy, it's not a relationship, it's a transaction.

What happens now?

A witch hunt, of course. In the end, with any luck, Congress will stop some of the money sloshing around the political system, and restore a bit of law and order to the wild frontier. But first, a few burnings at the stake. My wise friend Floyd Norris says there's a basic law of the market: When you get rich, it's because you're smart. When you get poor, it's because somebody cheated you. Just as Enron embodied the stock-market delirium on the way up, it will, now that the euphoria is over, be the scapegoat for all those smooth talkers who convinced us dummies that we could be rich.



>>

 

[Jejunum]

yah dont blame bush u punks

everyone should know he's to stuipd to be responsible for such a complicated scandal!

 

[tm37]

Enron Also gave money to Clinton and Actually got help! They Were for The kyoto Treaty and Got clinton to Push for it.

 

[Ns1]

<< hes to stuipd to be responsible anyways

i wont blame bush for anything just cauze hes so dumb...i blame his corrupt helperz
>>



wow that was the most informative post i have ever read!

 

[Infos]

Almost as pathetic as most of your posts :disgust:

 

[Ns1]

why thank you, at least i give reasons

But if you wanted a real answer-

If the Bush admin had stepped in, they would have been reamed by the Democrats for interefering with democracy.

If they didn't, they'd be reamed for not doing anything to stop it.

I could care less if Bush had ties to Enron and other huge corporations and whatnot, hey you gotta make money somehow right?

 

[XMan]

If the Bush admin had stepped in, they would have been reamed by the Democrats for interefering with democracy.

If they didn't, they'd be reamed for not doing anything to stop it.

Exactly.

It's a no-win situation.

 

[Harvey]

<< the management of Enron did this... not the president. >>

Today's interesting question is:

What did all those Enron execs have to say to Cheyney in those closed door meetings?

They were only discussing $250 million dollar tax rebates for a company that paid no taxes in the first place. :Q

They discussed further deregulating the energy business and allowing these companies to hide assets in foreign accounts. :Q

They were discussed gutting environmental regulations to allow drilling in places I'm not sure would be a good idea. :Q

Do you think Cheyney ever talks to Bush about these matters? Do you think maybe Bush also comes from the oil biz and took a lot of campaign money from them? :Q

Whatever happened in those meetings, Cheyney has refused to reveal the nature of those discussions, sighting executive privilege. How many of you so-called conservatives screamed bloody murder when Clinton did the same thing to try to avoid spilling his dirty laundry?

I don't know what was discussed, but I'm sure curious enough to want to know before I leap to any conclusions. I'm also interested in what "conservatives" are trying to conserve if they back Cheyney, Clinton, or anyone else in such actions when they may be hiding infromation the public has a right to know. It certainly isn't the U.S. Constitution or any sense of fairness in our government. :|

 

<< so far there's nothing that will implict the President in any wrong doing. >>


Same thing was said about whitewater and watergate.
Can we say STONEWALL?

 

[busmaster11]

<< I see that the Democrats are making a sad attempt at blaming Bush for the Enron failure. It's a really lame attempt and so far there's nothing that will implict the President in any wrong doing. >>



I blame Bush for a lot of things... economy, social security and taxes, the environment, our society as a whole, etc... But I wouldn't blame him for Enron... He's not the one in charge over there...

 

[charrison]

harvey,

would you have rather had bush/cheney develope an energy without inviting the energy providers?

 

[UltraQuiet]

<< I blame Bush for a lot of things... economy, social security and taxes, the environment, our society as a whole, etc... >>


So Bush has been in office for a year and you blame him for 1. an economy he inherited and was exasperated by 9/11, 2. lowering taxes, 3. he hasn't done anything to social security and 4. not fixing the enviroment and "society as a whole" in a year. You're kind of stupid aren't you.

 

[charrison]

3. he hasn't done anything to social security and


He needs to get to work on privitizing this mess.

 

[UltraQuiet]

<< He needs to get to work on privitizing this mess. >>


I agree with you, however, the opponents of it have all the political power they need with this Enron mess. Not going to happen in the forseeable future, IMO.

 

[Harvey]

charrison -- << would you have rather had bush/cheney develope an energy without inviting the energy providers? >>

No, I'd rather he invited other intelligent, knowledgable people with other viewpoints to participate in balanced discussions about policies that affect the entire nation, instead of holding them in secret with no notice and even less input from anyone other than energy execs, including big time input from Enron.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

I have a novel idea. Investigate everything that may have been illegal with Enron. See if Bush or Cheney can be connected to any of it. See if ANY politician sold influence for money. You cannot claim that because someone got campaign money, they did something wrong. You may not like it, but that is the way things are. So you look into Clinton, Congress, the bureaucracy in general. If anyone did anything wrong, be it Bush, Clinton, Cheney, Gore, Daeschel(sp?) or Lott, hang 'em. But don't guess. No one is going anywhere. We can wait for the answers.

 

[charrison]

harvey,

Who would you want invited?

 

[busmaster11]

<<

<< I blame Bush for a lot of things... economy, social security and taxes, the environment, our society as a whole, etc... >>


So Bush has been in office for a year and you blame him for 1. an economy he inherited and was exasperated by 9/11, 2. lowering taxes, 3. he hasn't done anything to social security and 4. not fixing the enviroment and "society as a whole" in a year. You're kind of stupid aren't you. >>


You're not bringing up anything that hasn't been talked to death here before. I'm sure he coulda used some of that tax money he refunded with defense issues these days, so instead he's drawing them out of social security... I'm curious, anyway... what Republicans would say to all Americans when confronted with the social security question... And with some hard numbers to back them up... As for number 4... how about backing his little red arse out of the Kyoto Treaty, putting global efforts on hold, or not showing up for a compromise?

Your comments indicate you've enclosed yourself in a bomb shelter the last few years. Hardly a position to call me stupid.

Someone wants to flame me, start a new thread. I just defended myself.

 

[charrison]

speaking of social security, found this great article on how to fix SS.

The alternate plan -- Used by a county in texas that was able to opt ot SS

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

I have seen a photo of Bill Clinton golfing with Ken Lay. Clinton looked like he was friends with Lay in the photo. I mean, Clinton was prez when a lot of these irregularities occurred.

Does that mean that Clinton should be investigated for this too. Of course not.

This is pathetic. The Enron collapse was a classic no-win situation. If Bush had helped"the little guy," he would have infinitely helped out "the big guy" - the higher ups at Enron, his friends and contributors. Bush did the right thing. Enron lied to investors; the truth came out; and the stock price cratered. There are Securities laws on the books to deal with situations like this. This is Enron's mistake - not the president's.

The Dems are just trying to have this both ways. They want to investigate it and I guarantee that they won't be happy with whatever they find. If one of Bush's people helped Enron, then Bush (or one of his agents) abused the power of the office to aid a Bush contributor. If nothing is found, then Bush is a heartless bastard for doing nothing, screwing over the poor hapless investor.

Right now the Dems are saying that Bush should have helped. Are any of you really naive / stupid enough to believe that the Democrats would have been happier had Bush bailed out Enron? Bull$hit - they are trying to capitalize on a political non-opportunity.

They want a story where there is none.

Presidents are powerful people with powerful connections. As such, no I am not amazed that Bush - or any other prez - has "connections" to every major financial, utility, energy, blah blah blah scandal in the past 25 years. I'm not amazed that Bush knows Lay. My former boss knows Lay. I brought Ken Lay a Coke once. Anybody who is anybody in Houston knows the man.

Should I be investigated?