Enron Bosses--Guilty; George Bush--Guilty

From the Nation via AlterNet:

Lay, who President Bush affectionately referred to as "Kenny-boy" when the two forged an alliance in the 1990s to advance Bush's political ambitions and Lay's business prospects, contributed $122,500 to Bush's gubernatorial campaigns in Texas. Lay would later explain to a PBS "Frontline" interviewer that, though he had worked closely with former Texas Governor Ann Richards, the Democrat incumbent who Bush challenged in 1994, he backed the Republican because "I was very close to George W."

And

All told, it is estimated that, over the years prior the company's bankruptcy, Lay, his company and its employees contributed close to $2 million to fund George W. Bush's political rise.

And

As Waxman explained in a 2001 interview, "The fact of the matter is that Enron and Ken Lay, who was the Chief Executive Officer of Enron, had an extraordinary amount of influence and access to the Bush Administration. Lay was called a close friend by both the President and the Vice President. When the Vice President chaired an Energy Task Force, Ken Lay had an opportunity to meet privately with the Vice President and to have a great deal of influence in their recommendations."

Click here for the rest.

I had almost forgotten the now classic Bush statement a week or so after Enron's collapse in late 2001 that it was a business scandal, not a political scandal. And, after Bush distanced himself from "Kenny-boy" Lay by insisting repeatedly, and falsely, that they barely knew each other, after a few show-laws were passed by Congress to illustrate how the GOP frowns on corporate corruption, after the corporate news media happily took the bait, a business scandal is what Enron turned out to be. Of course, that's not really true--that's simply what became of public discussion on the matter. In an era where there seems to be very little practical difference between corporate America and American government, Enron was always a political scandal.

It is impossible to say what political favors Bush spooned from the Oval Office out to the convicted businessman before his company fell; after all, one of the first major and successful political battles waged by the administration was to keep secret the discussions and members of Cheney's energy task force. Remember that? However, judging from the way that business has been done in Washington in the Abramoff era, it's probably safe to say that Ken Lay got back much more than the two million he invested in Bush over the years. If we'd had a real Congress at the time of Enron's collapse, and I'm including the Democrats who had a slim one-vote majority in the Senate for the first two years of Bush's reign, there would have been Whitewater style investigations out the wazoo for months on end. Instead, there was a scramble to make sure that the popular-among-elites business establishment was able to continue uninterrupted. Pathetic.

Just think: if everyone had been doing their jobs, Bush might have felt penned in, might not have ever felt that he had the "political capital" for launching the ill-fated invasion of Iraq. Actually, a Congressional investigation of Bush and Lay's relationship might have also kept Bush from doing all sorts of stupid shit, like suppressing information about global warming and birth control, psychotic tax cuts for the rich, you name it. In the end, Enron is as much about the collapse of one corporation as it is about the collapse of our entire political system.

That's why it's all going to happen again, sooner or later.

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