Enron Redux: Another scandal hitting

[chat_noir]

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" - DVD released today.

A timely debut for Enron DVD

Today's DVD debut of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, just two weeks before the start of the Enron trial, is no coincidence. In fact, the dates would have matched precisely if the trial hadn't been postponed to Jan. 30.
Most films released in April reached DVD before summer's end, "but Magnolia (Smartest Guys' distributor) felt the DVD is the ultimate viewer's guide to the trial," said director Alex Gibney.
A darkly comic dig into one of America's biggest corporate scandals, the film earned $4 million in theaters.
Smartest Guys was also a huge hit with critics, scoring 97 percent favorable reviews on review tracking site rottentomatoes.com. It's also on the short list of documentaries vying for an Academy Award nomination Jan. 31.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/3590614.html


With Ken Lay's trial starting shortly, looks like the administration may/should have another scandal in the news.

"so important it should be grouped together with movies like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Control Room." - FilmCritic.com

"Powerful on many levels at once, Enron couldn’t be more necessary as we wade into the muck of a second Bush term." - Film Threat

"Gibney exposes crucial moments where key players were clearly caught red-handed that's somehow more satisfying than anything the American legal system has managed (as in George Bush Sr.'s personalized farewell message to former Enron exec Rich Kinder: "You have been fantastic to the Bush family. I don't think anybody did more than you did to support George."). Who needs Nazis when you have characters like these?" - Premiere Magazine


Enron: The Forgotten Reason Bush Took Us to War

So why did Bush rush the process (to go to war)? Why was it so important to get the public prepared for war in the fall of 2002?

One answer, of course, is politics. You may recall that that the top story of first eight months of 2002 was one that made the Bush team nervous. Corporate corruption, especially the Enron scandal, had the full attention of the media and the public.

In January 2002, Ken Lay resigned as CEO of Enron. Two days later, Enron Vice President John C. Baxter committed suicide. The White House was sued because it refused to give over documents that almost certainly showed that Ken Lay had dictated the Administration’s energy policy. In June, Arthur Andersen, one of the nation’s oldest accounting firms, was found guilty on charges it helped Enron executives cook the books. In July, nine of the biggest banks were implicated in the scandal, including Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.

Polls showed that the public was outraged over Enron’s excesses, and Enron had close ties to the Republican Party, all the way up to the President himself. If this story stayed on the front burner, the Republicans might fail to take back the Senate and might even lose control of the House in the November congressionals.

http://www.pensitoreview.com/2005/06/21/enron-the-forgotten-reason-bush-took-us-to-war/


edited to change thread title

[chat_noir]

1. The Smoking Gun

While the White House has repeatedly described former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay as simply a "supporter" of George W. Bush, extensive correspondence between the two men paints a far cozier picture of their relationship, according to copies of letters obtained this afternoon (2/15) by The Smoking Gun.

The pages of correspondence, exchanged during the years Bush served as governor of Texas, were released today in Austin by the state archives in response to Freedom of Information requests filed by TSG and other news organizations.

The Bush-Lay material touches on both personal matters (birthday greetings and Bush's knee surgery) and public concerns of Lay and Enron, such as energy legislation and tort reform, and reflects the kind of jocular relationship that reportedly saw the nickname-happy Bush call the Enron boss "Kenny Boy." The Houston-based energy firm, Bush's leading career political contributor, is now bankrupt and the target of a multitude of criminal and congressional probes.

We've arranged the Bush-Lay letters into several batches and, where applicable, have followed an original letter with the recipent's reply. TSG will upload the correspondence as quickly as we can scan the documents. You'll find the first 15 letters below along with links that will get you to the additional pages.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/bushlay1.html

[chat_noir]

2. Poll: Did Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling commit fraud at Enron?

http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/11/news/companies/enron_fortune/


As a Top Enron Exec Pleads Guilty, Journalist Robert Bryce Discusses the Death of Enron and the Firm's Close Ties to President Bush

It remains unclear how the upcoming trial will affect President Bush - who was closely linked to the Texas-based firm. The family of Enron founder Ken Lay was one of President Bush's biggest financial backers. It donated about $140,000 to Bush's political campaigns in Texas and for the White House. The president personally nicknamed Ken Lay "Kenny Boy." Overall Enron employees gave Bush some $600,000 in political donations. According to the Center for Public Integrity this made Enron Bush's top career donor - a distinction the company maintained until last year. Shortly after Bush took office in 2001, Vice President Cheney reportedly met with Enron officials while he was developing the administration's energy policies. - Robert Bryce, investigative reporter based in Austin, Texas. He has been covering U.S. energy issues since 1989 and is the author of two books: "Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron" and "Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America"s Superstate."

AMY GOODMAN: That was Ken Lay's attorney, Michael Ramsey. It remains unclear how the upcoming trial will affect President Bush, who was closely linked to the Texas-based firm. The family of Enron founder Ken Lay was one of President Bush's biggest financial backers, donating about $140,000 to Bush's political campaigns in Texas and for the White House. The President personally nicknamed Ken Lay “Kenny Boy.” Overall, Enron employees gave Bush some $600,000 in political donations. According to the Center for Public Integrity, this made Enron Bush’s top career donor, a distinction the company maintained until last year. Shortly after Bush took office in 2001, Vice President Cheney reportedly met with Enron officials while he was developing the administration's energy policies.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you now put it in the context of the rise of the Bushes in Texas? In your book, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate, you really paint a picture of how they are all intertwined.
ROBERT BRYCE: Well, sure. One of the reasons I wrote Cronies was simply because it was, as I finished my book on Enron, I thought, well, what made Enron so powerful, and it was that it was an energy company. I mean, this was the premiere, most famous, most powerful energy company in Houston, which, of course, is the center of the global energy business. So, the rise of Enron was a reflection of the go-go style in Houston and, of course, the Bushes were in Texas largely because of the energy business. George Bush, Sr., of course, was in the oil business, as was George W. Bush.

And recall that Enron had a hand in many of the Bushes' efforts to get into public office. Ken Lay was one of the first donors to George H.W. Bush's campaign when he made his first run for president. When George W. Bush ran for governor, one of his first stops was at Enron, and he convinced Rich Kinder who was, at that time, Enron’s president to be his finance chair in Harris County, where Houston is located. So, Enron and the Bushes have -- I think it’s safe to say that no other company in America had closer ties to the Bushes when George W. Bush decided to run for president in the 2000 campaign and, in fact, the overall numbers for George W. Bush's campaign in 2000 from Enron, the total contributions to both his personal campaign and to the Republican National Committee, was well over a million dollars, and that money bought Enron then, in the first Bush administration, unprecedented access.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/29/151216