www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/enro-j18.shtml
A column in the Los Angeles Times last week referred to the affair as "Teapot Dome, the Sequel" (the Teapot Dome affair essentially brought an end to the Harding administration in the 1920s). It is pointless at the moment to speculate whether or not Enron will prove the present government's undoing. The more critical issue is grasping the extent to which Enron as a criminal and parasitic enterprise expresses the social essence of the Bush administration and the American ruling elite as a whole. To speak of "connections" or "intimate ties" between Enron and the Bush regime nearly misses the point. To a large extent, the present administration is an extension of the Enron board of directors. This government, one might say, is Enron in office, not simply because numerous Bush cabinet members and other appointees (and other leading Republicans) have been employed in one capacity or another by Enron, but more profoundly in the sense that the social types found in Enron's boardroom and in leading government posts in Washington are interchangeable. As evidence one might simply note that the top law enforcement official in the land, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was obliged to recuse himself January 10, along with his chief of staff, David Ayres, from the criminal investigation into Enron launched by his own department because he received tens of thousands of dollars from the company for an unsuccessful bid to hold onto his Senate seat in the 2000 elections. The Vice President of the United States, former oil man Dick Cheney, has been obliged, under pressure from congressional investigators, to acknowledge that he or members of his staff met six times with Enron executives last spring during discussions held by his secret energy task force. The only executive Cheney met with alone was Enron chief Kenneth Lay. From this point of view, to debate whether Bush government officials "crossed the line" in their dealings with the energy trading firm results from a misunderstanding. In effect, one is being asked to accept that Bush's 2000 campaign manager (Evans) did not inform the president, or at least have him informed, that his long-time backer and largest financial contributor (Lay) was facing disaster. It is more likely that he didn't tell him because Bush already knew. In any event, the very manner in which the Enron crisis has burst into the headlines has considerable significance. Once again the underlying social issues in the US are coming to the fore. This speaks to the reality that the war in Afghanistan has been driven from the beginning by the growing social and political crisis in the US. It is enough to ask: what would be the standing of the Bush regime if there had been no attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 and no war as a result? The administration, only eight months old, was increasingly beleaguered and unpopular at home and abroad by the end of last summer. There is every reason to believe that had it not been for the suicide hijackings and subsequent events, the standing of the Bush government might mirror the present condition of Enron on the New York Stock Exchange, where the price of one of its shares has fallen from $90 to under a dollar. Enron's collapse, in its own fashion, gives some indication of the fragility of the political standing of the extreme right and the narrowness of its social base. It cannot be considered coincidental that the resignation of Jeff Skilling--one of the architects of Enron's meteoric rise--as chief executive in August (at a time when we now know a company vice president was warning that Enron was about to implode in "a wave of accounting scandals") was followed three weeks later by the announcement from Gramm, whose family fortunes (literally) have been bound up with Enron's fate, that he was bowing out of political life. In the wake of Enron's spectacular demise, a whole host of media analysts are wagging their fingers at what they describe as the "excesses" of the 1990s. One is presumably meant to conclude that, finally, cooler heads have prevailed. On the contrary, Enron is a paradigm for American capitalism in the era of Reagan, Clinton and the two Bushes. As we have previously noted on the WSWS, the deregulatory policies of Republican and Democratic administrations alike created conditions where profits could be accumulated, not through the construction of new facilities and the organization of new energy supplies, but through manipulations in the energy market. Enron acted like a financial speculator, purchasing and selling energy contracts extending months and even years into the future. Enron was not an excrescence, some entity peripheral to the workings of American and global capitalism. The Wall Street Journal, in a piece suggestively titled "How Wall Street Greased Enron's Money Engine," writes: "The upshot: Some of the world's leading banks and brokerage firms provided Enron with crucial help in creating the intricate--and, in crucial ways, misleading--financial structure that fueled the energy trader's impressive rise but ultimately led to its spectacular downfall. Indeed, without the financial grease from Wall Street, Enron wouldn't have grown into the nation's biggest energy trader and seventh-biggest company. The firm created a market for energy futures where none existed or needed to exist. Its role in California was particularly disastrous, where it deliberately manipulated energy prices, helping to nearly bankrupt the state. It was apparently assisted in its shady operations by accountants at Andersen, whose officials have now acknowledged that the firm shredded or deleted thousands of potentially incriminating documents as the roof was falling in last autumn. Enron essentially produced nothing and served no legitimate economic purpose. In the end, Enron's "asset-light" approach led to disaster, when disclosures of its web of transactions with related partnerships, some headed by company executives, shook investor confidence. Of Enron's reported $60 billion in assets, only about $10-15 billion is still in physical plant and equipment, according to estimates. Enron's methods accumulated fantastic wealth in the hands of top executives and have now wrought devastation on its workforce and those taken in by its promises. Bush officials see nothing extraordinary about Enron's rise and fall. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who has also acknowledged receiving calls from Lay last October about Enron's financial crisis, stated in a television interview last weekend that he was not surprised by the company's demise. People get to make good decisions or bad decisions, and they get to pay the consequences or to enjoy the fruits of their decisions. Moreover, it is a distinct possibility that many or all of those who operated in a fraudulent manner will "pay" no legal or financial "consequences" and continue "to enjoy the fruits" of their criminality. On the one hand, a corporation with no assets, and on the other, a government with no legitimacy. The political faction now in power in Washington first came to prominence under Reagan. After the defeat of the elder Bush in 1992, they chafed under Clinton, despite all his best efforts to appease them. They viewed even the most timid restrictions on their unfettered access to wealth as intolerable. Lacking confidence in their ability to gain office through elections, these right-wing forces, with the aid of a cabal of reactionary lawyers and judges, leveraged the trivia of the Whitewater-Jones-Lewinsky affairs into an impeachment drive aimed at unseating a twice-elected president. Following last year's election, in which Al Gore won the national popular vote and, by all indications, the popular vote in Florida, the Bush forces, gangster-like, hijacked the vote. The Bush administration was installed in office through fraud and rules that way today, in both domestic and foreign affairs. It has seized upon the September 11 terrorist attack to implement a sweeping, right-wing agenda of attacks on democratic rights at home and embarked on an open-ended colonial war in Central Asia, whose principal purpose is to pave the way for US...
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