Enron: The Bush Connection
AMY GOODMAN: One of the things that wasn’t addressed very much yesterday, though there was wall-to-wall coverage of the trial and the verdict that came down yesterday for Skilling and for Lay — Ken Lay found guilty on every count — is the connection between President Bush and Enron. Enron founder Ken Lay and his family rank among President Bush’s biggest financial backers of his political career. The family donated about $140,000 to Bush’s political campaigns in Texas and for the White House.
The President personally nicknamed Ken Lay ÒKenny Boy.Ó 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 2004. Shortly after Bush took office in 2001, Vice President Cheney met with Enron officials while he was developing the administration’s energy policies. Our guest, Greg Palast, examined the connections between Enron and the Bush administration in his documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.
GREG PALAST: Even before he takes the presidential oath, Bush forms a secret task force, including Enron’s Ken Lay to rewrite America’s environmental and energy laws.
CRAIG McDONALD: He put the very people who funded him in the room to devise a clean air policy. They wrote the policy. He enacted the policy and the policy was strictly voluntary, did nothing to clean up the air, yet he touted it as a major accomplishment.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Instead of the government telling utilities where and how to cut pollution, we will give them a firm deadline and let them find the most innovative ways to meet it.
CRAIG McDONALD: These same funders were sick and tired of trying to play by the environmental rules and regulations. George Bush gave them an environmental clean air policy that any corporation would lust after.
JIM HIGHTOWER: How proud we are to be the number one state in the country in air pollution.
CRAIG McDONALD: Ken Lay, got almost total complete energy deregulation out of George Bush.
JIM HIGHTOWER: What did the Bush administration do? It refused to impose price controls to put a cap on those utility prices, meaning a company like Enron could set its own prices to consumers.
CORPORATE EXECUTIVE: Show me the money! Show me the money!
CRAIG McDONALD: He was delivering a favor in a policy that the donors who put him in that office want.
JIM HIGHTOWER: Consumers in California were being stiffed, and Enron was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars during that period in corrupt profits. So that’s a pretty good payback.
GREG PALAST: But Enron squandered their California windfall in a series of spectacular frauds which imploded, leaving thousands jobless and pensioners bankrupt. Now, George tried to downplay his links with Enron’s Ken Lay and other corrupt bosses.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: By far, the vast majority of CEOs in America are good honorable, honest people. In the corporate world, sometimes things aren’t exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures, and the SEC’s job is to rev — is to look and is to determine whether or not, whether or not, whether or not the decision by the auditors was the appropriate decision.
JIM HIGHTOWER: Ken Lay, whom George W. fondly called ÒKenny Boy,Ó was the major campaign contributor to George W. Bush, and they exchanged Christmas cards with each other. Ken Lay was very personal, very close with the Bush family.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I do know that Mr. Lay came to the White House in — early in my administration along with, I think, twenty other business leaders to discuss the state of the economy. It was just kind of a general discussion. I have not met with him personally.
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