Go back in time---way back in time---to the first George W. Bush administration, when the top players in the executive branch pretended that they did not believe themselves above the law. Mind you, that was only because they knew that they had to get reelected in 2004. They could not reveal their disdain for the American voter---yet.
In the late summer of 2001 something very, very bad happened. Enron, Bush's biggest campaign donor, one of the biggest companies in the world and a criminal organization engaged in the process of robbing the state of California blind (with the active assistance of the Bush administration) was about to go bankrupt. This, despite the fact that Condie and Co. had been working like dogs all summer to broker a deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan to get Enron some real work, building a gas pipeline. Eeks! The Bush administration was pretty unpopular already. What was going to happen when Kenny Boy Lay went under, taking with him countless jobs, pensions and when all those California voters' cries of "We dun been robbed!" were proved correct?
Fortunately for Bush and Co. 9-11 happened. It was a big distraction for the news media. The GOP even tried to save Enron using 9-11. The Republican House passed something called the Economic Security and Recovery Act of 2001, which would have given Enron an immediate infusion of taxes it had never paid.
http://www.foe.org/policy/57e4e.pdfThe White House endorsed this legislation
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/legislative/sap/107-1/HR3090-h.htmlThough during the height of the Enron scandal, they would claim otherwise. They even sent one of their administrative officials to Congress to lobby for it. I know. I read the transcript of his speech on line years ago---before the White House scrubbed it. In early 2002, they got the Washington Post to report that they had never endorsed the bill. I guess they are feeling pretty safe now, and that is why they are no longer afraid to admit on line that they were all for the infusion of tax payer money into the floundering Enron empire under guise of economic stimulus post 9-11.
Dana Milibank, not exactly a White House enemy sums up the close ties between the administration and Enron in this article:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0118-01.htmHowever, the most damning document, the one that makes the most fascinating reading by far is the one put together by the Democratic Senate in November 2002, as they were preparing to turn over the reins to the Republicans. Here it is.
Open
http://news.findlaw.com/legalnews/lit/enron/Now go to “Congressional Investigations” Committee Staff Investigation of FERC's Oversight of Enron Corp. (Nov. 12, 2002) and open the 50 plus page document, and read about how the Senate faulted the FERC for having evidence that market manipulation was possible as far back as 2000 but failing to launch an investigation until 2002. The FERC's first interim report was not released until August 2002.
I will wait while you read it. At least skim the entire document. It has dirt about everyone in the Bush administration. You will be astounded at what the mainstream media chose to ignore in its fervor to cover everything related to I-R-A-Q.
But hey, if you are busy, here are some choice bits:
1. On page 34 the authors criticizes the FERC for not acting in 2000-1 and therefore not preventing market abuses.
(In case anyone says "But they couldn't have acted that early, no one knew what was going on" here is just one of many links by private citizens who had no trouble connecting the dots in 2001
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/electricity/Enron/articles.cfm?ID=7104)
2. On p. 39 Initial evaluation by the FERC in 2000 found the potential for abuse, however no further action was taken by the FERC until Feb 13, 2002
after Enron's when bankrupt when a preliminary investigation was begun.
3. “Had the commission agreed to start a more thorough investigation immediately following the release of the November 2000 staff report, it may have uncovered earlier the type of evidence it believed necessary to substantiate the charges of market abuse in California.” P. 39
4. Enron suggested nominees, Nora Brownwell and Pat Wood as chairs for the FERC to the Bush administration, knowing they would rule favorably on Enron’s California transactions. In addition, Jeff Skilling met with Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil and others to discuss Calfornia, Ken Lay talked to Dick Cheney about California on April 17, 2001, Larry Lindsey assistant to the president also discussed California with Ken Lay (page 45). All of this contact
while Enron was bleeding California dry.
This was some report. A damning report. And yet, I'll bet that only Enron junkies like me ever heard a word about it. That was because starting in September, 2002, the mainstream media stopped talking about Enron, which had been a really hot topic from the previous winter all the way through the summer of 2002, and began to focus exclusively on beating the drums to war. Suddenly, Senate Democrats could not win reelection by getting to the bottom of the worst bankruptcy scandal and the worst corporate theft scandal--theft aided by the current administration---in modern history. They had to show their patriotism by signing up for a war of choice against a nation that was not a threat. And even when they did so, Karl Rove branded them traitors and pussies in campaign ads for the crime of merely being Democrats. The ongoing Senate investigation into Enron---the only chance that the members of the Bush administration would ever be held accountable for their crimes---was about to be brought to a screeching halt.
And just in the nick of time, too, as the Senate report showed. Had there been no war news filling the airwaves, Enron might have become news. And there was more news to come. The Democratic Senate, combined with the General Accountability Office (GAO) which had ripped the FERC a new one in a document from late summer 2002
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02656.pdf had forced the FERC to form a new oversight division, the Office of Market Oversight and Investigations.
The FERC had served Bush by refusing to acknowledge the problem. See no evil, speak no evil. The OMOI now had the job of investigating and reporting on what went wrong with the California energy markets in 2000-1. Since it was obvious to even lay people what went wrong, everyone knew what the report was going to say. The best that the Bush administration could do was hope that the press would not report on the OMOI's findings. How do you keep the press from reporting a story? You give them a bigger, flashier story. Like a brand new sparkling war.
Now, I want to digress. How deeply were members of the Bush administration implicated in the price gouging of California? It goes way beyond just owning Enron stock as Milibank suggests. See the Senate report about all the meetings between Enron and the administration during the first few months of 2001. And check out these links.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/071907J.shtmlIn this scary article, the author describes how Cheney ordered to FERC to suppress evidence of market manipulation in California.
But the documentary evidence of widespread market manipulation that FERC obtained in March 2001, while Kelliher was soliciting energy industry officials to assist in writing the National Energy Policy, and when Cruikshank and Allbaugh disclosed to the vice president the manipulative tactics Williams and Reliant had engaged in, was sealed by FERC on direct orders by Cheney because it would have been a political nightmare for the Bush administration and would have derailed a recommendation of one of the cornerstones of the vice president's National Energy Policy: deregulation, and perhaps scuttle the policy altogether if evidence about the energy companies behavior in California was made public, according to half-a-dozen former FERC officials and former Energy Department officials.
"The basic problem in California was caused by Californians," Cheney said, adding that he would resist calls by lawmakers to allow price caps to be placed on wholesale energy prices in the Western United States.
Even after Hebert had secured evidence showing that Williams manipulated the power market, he continued to pin the blame for skyrocketing power prices squarely on the shoulders of Davis and the state's Democratic leaders.
Bush blamed California, too
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=the_bush_administration_s_environmental_record_227 “The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants,” he says.
Other Bush administration officials were similarly implicated, like Karl Rove who lobbied for Enron's FERC chair pics and Thomas White, Bush's first Army Secretary who used to run the Enron division responsible for the price gouging and who is rumored to have said that the key to Enron's solvency was "California" and a whole host of underlings who met or spoke with Enron officials during the California price gouging and later during the bankruptcy.
Ok, back to late 2002. Karl Rove used the coming war with Iraq to unseat enough Democratic Senators to shut down the dangerous (for him and the rest of the Bush administration) Senate investigations into Enron. Though Enron had given to members of both parties, it had given most heavily to Republicans in the summer of 2001, when it knew that bankruptcy loomed. And Enron was a GOP scandal in the public's mind. Karl Rove was already plotting to unseat Davis of Calforfornia and replace him with a Republican governor, since another danger for the Enron co-conspirators was the civil suit of California against Enron. The discovery phase of that suit could get nasty for the administration, if someone like Thomas White or Karl Rove or the FERC chair was called to testify. (Gov. Arnold later took care of that problem). The only thing left to worry about was what the public would say when the FERC's OMOI finally admitted what the FERC and Bush-Cheney had been denying for all those years---yes, Enron had price gouged California.
A recent news story has revealed that Bush told the Spanish Prime Minister in February 2003 that the US army would be in Iraq in March. That means that all his "requests" before the UN were a sham. The case he made before the American people was for show. The administration had made up its mind in advance that March, 2003 would suit its purposes very well. It was all timed out. The army said it was because they wanted to get in and out before the hot weather of summer hit. Maybe. And maybe some other things were being coordinated at home, like the long awaited release of the FERC's OMOI's first big report, on what exactly happened to the California electricity market in 2000-1.
If you do not remember hearing about that blockbuster, do not panic. You do not have Alzheimers. The story was there, buried on the last page of the business section. The problem was that the US had just invaded Iraq. Unless you lived in Los Angeles, your local and national news providers were not going to cover a story that was so six months ago. Not when there was a bright shiny war to cover.
If you want to see what you missed go here
http://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/wec/enron/info-release.aspLook to the right at "Final Report on Price Manipulation in Western Markets in 2003" and open up the summary or the long versions. Here is the summary that admits (finally!) that Enron really was price gouging California
http://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/wec/enron/summary-findings.pdfNow, imagine that 9-11 never happened. The Bush administration did not get that ratings boost. Enron went under, the Democratic Senate started doing its investigation and issued its report of November, 2002 in which it found all the smoking guns indicating that there was price manipulation in California and that many members of the Bush administration including Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and the FERC actively participated. The FERC, in order to save its ass, was forced to do an investigation and admit that there really was market manipulation. With no 9-11, the Bush administration could not sucker America into the Neo-Cons' war of choice for oil with Iraq. The Dems did not lose control of the Senate in 2002, so they could continue the Enron hearings...
Maybe, just maybe the Bush administration would have been held accountable for what they did to one of the biggest states in the union. Almost certainly, W. would not have been reelected. Or been able to steal an election.
The Iraq War has been very, very good for W. in more ways that one. However, it is never too late for Congress to revisit Enron, the mother of all scandals, the one in which the administration can not claim "national security" or "article 2". But they had better hurry, before Jeff Skilling "slips" in the shower in prison.
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