Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [87]
Just as Poppy had done in Argentina, Dubya turned the State Department over to Enron. He had a senior State Department official deliver a démarche, an official warning, to the Indians. Cheney leaned on Indian opposition leader Sonia Ghandi. “Good news is that the VEEP mentioned Enron in his meeting with Sonia Gandhi,” reads a National Security Council e-mail. It’s the NSC and the VEEP that illustrate the Bush administration’s slavish devotion to Enron. While it’s unseemly for the Commerce Department to serve as a private bill collector for a U.S. company, well, at least it’s commerce. The NSC is supposed to be in another line of work.
When doing the bidding of their corporate sponsors the Bushes are industrious. In India, Overseas Private Investment Corporation chairman Peter Watson was almost as unsubtle as Terrence Todman had been in doing Poppy’s bidding in Argentina. In an e-mail to Prime Minister Vajpayee’s national security adviser, Watson warned that India had better deliver on Enron’s Dabhol plant. “The acute lack of progress in this matter has forced Dabhol to rise to the highest levels of the United States government . . . and could have a negative effect regarding other U.S. agencies and their ability to function in India.”
Dubya Bush was prepared to lean on Vajpayee during a White House visit on November 8, 2002—the very day the SEC finally got around to delivering subpoenas to Enron and announcing that the company was the target of a federal investigation. An internal White House memo sent at 2:33 P.M. stopped him: “President Bush cannot talk about Dabhol,” warned the memo.
Not a great moment in American foreign policy. Condi Rice brought together the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Office of U.S. Trade Representative, and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and still failed to collect on Enron’s debt. (The whole sordid tale is told in Robert Bryce’s Pipe Dreams.)
There is more on the domestic front.
Ken Lay could get private face-time with Vice President Cheney, but Senator Feinstein couldn’t—even while Lay’s electricity hustlers were plundering the state Feinstein represents. Lay had at least one meeting (that we know of) with Cheney while the vice president was looking for direction in how to shape the nation’s energy policy. Lay also joined Cheney on an American Petroleum Institute panel in Colorado in June 2001—while Enron was squeezing record-high electricity bills out of Californians. Others from Enron met repeatedly with Cheney.
As Parry and The Washington Post reported, after the Enron meeting with the vice president and his energy-policy group, Cheney’s energy task force changed a proposal to include a provision to boost oil and natural-gas production in India. The amendment was so narrow it was obvious it was designed to help bail out Enron’s bad investment in India. It wasn’t the only pro-Enron energy policy; California congressman Henry Waxman found seventeen proposals that had been requested by Enron—all in the draft of the vice president’s energy plan.
Even as Enron was collapsing, undersecretary for domestic finance Peter Fisher called Enron president Greg Whalley “six to eight times.” Commerce secretary Don Evans was in touch with Enron executives, and Bush was getting ready to muscle the Indian prime minister even as SEC investigators were kicking in Enron’s doors.
We’re not arguing that the Bush administration could have saved Enron (for its investors and from itself), nor do we hold them responsible for what happened at WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, Global Crossing, and dozens of other “isolated bad apples” engaged in corporate