Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [85]
Lay saw nothing wrong with the former president advancing his sales force. “Is it bad taste for American companies to do business with Kuwait? . . . What’s wrong with hiring former American officials to encourage investments anywhere in the world? Jim Baker has given me some very helpful advice to be more competitive in the world. I ask you, what in the hell is wrong with that?” Almost makes you wonder if Enron could have been saved had it survived long enough to take advantage of the markets President Dubya Bush opened up in Iraq.
Neil and Marvin Bush also made the Kuwait trip with Poppy. Marvin was selling electric security fences. Neil came home with his parents but returned a few weeks later, hoping to persuade Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity to cut him in on any management fees Enron would earn running Kuwait’s reconstructed power plants. Lay was the chair of the Host Committee at the 1992 Houston Republican National Convention. His guy lost to Bill Clinton, but eight years later Lay was again “getting serviced,” as they say around the barnyard, by the Bush administration.
The Bushes’ servicing of Ken Lay and Co. continued until Enron collapsed and Dubya Bush started to act as if Ken Lay were part of the Axis of Evil. Until that happened, Lay knew he could count on the Bushes. In 1997, at Lay’s request, Governor Bush went to bat for Enron, calling then-Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to push for the deregulation policies Lay wanted in place in Pennsylvania.
Before he became the poster boy for corporate corruption, Lay managed to get Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman Curtis Hebert fired and replaced him with Enron’s handpicked candidate. The new FERC member, Pat Wood, had worked on the same utility-deregulation bill in Texas that Enron wanted to impose on the nation. Hebert was a Bill Clinton appointee, named to the commission in January 2001. He’s not exactly a pro-consumer radical. A Republican who served in the Mississippi Legislature, Hebert was a close ally of the most powerful Republican in the Senate, Trent Lott. (This was before Strom Thurmond’s one-hundredth birthday party.) Lay called Hebert to tell him that unless he changed his position on retail competition in the energy business, he’d be sent home to Mississippi.
Lay did tell Hebert that the final decision on his job “was going to be the president’s, certainly not ours.” That’s what the president would call a “nuanced message.”
It was a revealing episode. One of the president’s corporate sponsors was threatening to fire the chair of the commission that regulated that contributor’s business. Lay did it. Three months after the phone call from Lay, Hebert was out and Pat Wood was in.
Taking out a sitting U.S. congressman in your home state is no small feat. Busting a sitting presidential appointee who had the support of the Senate’s leading Republican indicates some awesome clout, and Ken Lay hardly broke a sweat when he sent Hebert packing.
Lay’s scheme to consolidate the states’ electricity grids into four giant regional transition organizations was more than a states’-rights son of the South like Hebert could swallow. Lay had another grudge against Hebert. In May 2001 Hebert had ordered FERC investigators to look into the complex derivative-financing schemes Enron and other electricity traders were using to “game the market.”
Dinners?
With the election of G. W. Bush, Lay had enough stroke at the White House to get more than the occasional free meal. He was writing policy and making appointments. Before his Ponzi scheme collapsed, Lay managed to make two FERC appointments. He had to work harder for the second one, calling Bush political strategist (and Enron shareholder) Karl Rove to make the case for Nora Mead Brownell, a Pennsylvania utilities regulator best known for her anti-regulatory zeal.
Call it the Lay Legacy. His