Laptop Battery During the administration of the first President George Bush, a new party fundraiser named Kenneth L. Lay was invited to spend the night at the White House. The sleepover was an early coup for the chairman of Enron Corp. and a harbinger of things to come.
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Thinkpad Over the following decade, Lay and Enron poured millions of dollars into U.S. politics, cultivating unequaled access and using the entree to lobby Congress, the White House and regulatory agencies for action that was critical to the energy company's spectacular growth.
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Microsoft Now, with Enron's sudden bankruptcy, public attention has turned not only to the financial practices that brought the company down, but to what its far-flung political operations say about the country's campaign finance system.
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Laptop Computers Some Democrats in Congress are spoiling for an opportunity to use Lay and Enron to embarrass the Republican Party, which received most of the company's largess over the years. They want to look into such things as Enron's relationship with Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), ranking minority member on the Senate Banking Committee and chairman of the committee at a time when his wife, Wendy L. Gramm, was serving on Enron's board. Last year, Gramm's committee approved legislation that included a key provision exempting parts of Enron's massive energy trading operation from federal oversight.
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Laptop Computer "I think the Enron story is going to turn out to be an enormous political story," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), ranking minority member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
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Desktop Computer The ties of Lay to the White House and GOP leaders, he added, were so multilayered that Republicans are likely to be reluctant to pursue them. But he made clear that he intends to do so and expects the Democratic-controlled Senate to follow suit.
Notebooks Enron also cultivated relationships with Democrats, however. Lay played golf in Vail, Colo., with President Bill Clinton, and Enron gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic campaign committees and Democrats in the House and Senate, including Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Rep. Martin Frost (Tex.), the ranking minority member on the House Rules Committee.
Lenovo A Routine Cost for Some
Hard Drive Advocates of campaign finance reform say the Enron case vividly illustrates the ties between politics and big money, though it's unclear that the company's political operations were radically different from others for whom political contributions have become a routine cost of doing business.
Travelstar "There are aspects of [the Enron case] that remind us of the savings and loan scandal, in the sense that a powerful institution used big money to buy influence and protect itself while ordinary citizens ended up losing their life savings," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a Washington interest group, referring to a banking controversy in the 1980s.
Gateway Enron's ties to Republicans and the present Bush administration were especially close. Lay raised large sums for George W. Bush's campaign.
Laptop Parts Enron, Lay and its employees have contributed $572,350 to him over his career, far more than any other company, according to the Center for Public Integrity in Washington.
Software Several top administration officials have been Enron advisers or stockholders. Enron, Lay and other senior executives contributed $1.7 million in soft-money donations to politicians in the 2000 election cycle, two-thirds of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Hard Drives Republicans clearly are sensitive to the potential political dangers. The National Republican Senatorial Committee recently returned a $100,000 check collected from Enron in November, after deciding that "it was appropriate to give it back," spokesman Dan Allen said. The Republican Governors Association last week returned an Enron donation of $60,000.
Electronics What was unique about Enron, competitors and allies agree, was a brash and sometimes counterproductive political style.
Canon Stories of Enron's hardball style are legion. In October 1999, for example, Jeffrey K. Skilling, then Enron's president, expressed his displeasure at Rep. Joe Barton's position on a deregulation bill pending in the energy subcommittee Barton chairs.
Desktop Pc The meeting grew "heated and awful," said one person who was present, until Barton (R-Tex.), a usually mild-mannered man who keeps a Bible on his desk, exploded. "Jeffrey Skilling, I may not have your millions of dollars, but I am not an idiot," one witness recalled Barton saying. The meeting ended without Enron getting the changes it wanted.
Desktop Computers "Skilling did not get Washington," the source added.
Think Pad "In their lobbying, they acted like the 800-pound gorilla they were," said Christopher Horner, a Washington lawyer who briefly directed Enron's government relations in 1997.
Repair Lay and Skilling declined interview requests, but Enron officials say they have no regrets about their use of money. "It got us name recognition," company spokesman Mark Palmer said. "Given the aggregation of our foes, we had to make sure that people knew what our argument was."
Data Recovery Jump-Starting Deregulation
Cisco Almost from its start in 1985 as a gas pipeline company, Enron needed help in Washington, and it got it in a series of actions by Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that undermined the traditional monopoly of utility companies over power plants and transmission lines.
Keyboard Enron lobbied for several of the initial actions that set the stage for the era of a deregulated wholesale electricity market.
Monitor It supported the 1992 Energy Policy Act, which opened the utility companies' wires to electricity merchants such as Enron. It also worked with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission -- then chaired by Wendy Gramm -- for a regulatory exemption for futures trading in energy derivatives, which later became Enron's most lucrative business. Soon after Gramm stepped down in 1993, she was appointed to Enron's board.
Desktop Independent sources knowledgeable about these dealings, however, said Enron was not the main interested party. They said the lead was taken by several major oil companies, including British Petroleum Co. and Phillips Petroleum Co., which were concerned about the effect of CFTC regulation on their offshore trading in crude oil contracts. Wendy Gramm, an apostle of free markets, needed little convincing, the sources said.
Infosys That same year, Lay served as chairman of the committee organizing the Republican National Convention in Houston. Hedging its bets, Enron made a major contribution to a "street fair" in honor of Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), a key energy policymaker, at the Democratic convention.
Refurbished Laptops Key orders by FERC in 1996 also supported Enron's transformation into a freewheeling trader of gas, electricity and more exotic products, such as telecommunications services and sulfur-dioxide emissions credits.
Wipro The new rules ensured that Enron and other merchant companies could buy electricity from independent power plants and sell it to distant customers, using transmission lines borrowed from utility companies.
Lap Top Even Enron's harshest critics credit Lay with putting new issues -- such as electricity deregulation -- on the Washington agenda. Lay,a former Interior Department official with a PhD in economics, became "the ambassador" for deregulation, one former employee said.
Refurbished Throughout the 1990s, Enron's agenda was opposed by coal-burning utilities, especially ones in the Southeast, which viewed the emerging wholesale electricity market as a threat to their turf. Many of these, such as Atlanta-based Southern Co., had impressive political funding and connections of their own.
Memory But with the explosive growth of Enron and the GOP takeover of Congress in 1995, the company's soft-money donations -- unregulated and unlimited gifts to political parties and organizations -- jumped sharply. They went from about $136,000 in the 1993-94 election cycle, to $687,000 in 1996 and $1.7 million in 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Intel Frustrated by Washington
As400 For all its connections, sources say, Enron often found Washington frustratingly slowand unreliable.
Averatec The company placed a substantial bet on federal support for limits on the greenhouse gases causing global warming. Enron officials hoped to exploit a new market in industry for carbon-emissions credits, similar to the one that developed for sulphur credits after clean-air legislation was enacted in 1990.
Hardware Lay joined the Union of Concerned Scientists and environmental groups in calling for curbs on carbon in the atmosphere. The Clinton administration was supportive, but this year the Bush administration reneged on a campaign pledge to impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal-burning power plants.
Dual Xeon A multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign in Congress to secure legislation requiring states to institute retail electricity deregulation fared even worse.
Storage Enron hired former New York representative Bill Paxon, a leading conservative, to run Americans for Affordable Electricity, which commissioned studies and recruited business support for deregulation. But the legislation never made it out of a congressional subcommittee.
Seagate At the same time, Enron was growing restive over the slow pace of deregulation in the wholesale electricity market, the core of its business. Large parts of the country, especially the Southeast, were still monopolized by regulated utilities that limited the opportunity for trading gas, electricity and energy derivatives.
Computer Sales Political Pragmatism
Computer Hardware Enron's political pragmatism was demonstrated in the 1998 New York Senate election, when it dropped its support of the Republican incumbent, Alfonse M. D'Amato, after Democrat Schumer endorsed Enron's goal of wholesale deregulation, sources said. Lay reciprocated by hosting several fundraisers for Schumer, and Enron's political action committee contributed $7,500 to the Schumer campaign.
Printers The company's lobbying team expanded along with its political spending. It outgrew the two-person operation that existed in 1989 and began to reflect Enron's interest in everything from pipeline safety and derivatives trading to Overseas Private Investment Corp. loan guarantees.
Technology By last year, its lobbying expenses exceeded $2 million a year and covered a raft of big-name consultants, such as former Montana governor Marc F. Racicot, the new Republican National Committee chairman, and former top aides to House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.)
Mainframe The hazards of Enron's efforts to connect with both parties were evident last year, when shortly before the November election, the company picked a Clinton administration Treasury official, Linda Robertson, to run its Washington office.
Samsung A perturbed DeLay, whose campaign and related funds had received more than $100,000 from Enron and Lay, briefly "excommunicated" Enron, a House source said. Robertson was not invited to a series of meetings of electricity lobbyists held in DeLay's office last July, though an Enron official did finally attend the sessions.
Computer Repair Enron had more success when Congress overwhelmingly approved legislation last year containing a provision precluding the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) from regulating Enron's trading in energy derivatives. These instruments are traded largely between electricity dealers and big wholesale consumers, which use them to hedge against price swings that could adversely affect their businesses.
Used Computers The exemption, tucked into broader legislation that established the legality of unregulated derivatives trading by banks, was not supported by a Clinton administration working group, largely because of opposition from the CFTC. Since the departure of Wendy Gramm, some in the agency had lobbied for tighter control over the exploding energy derivatives market. The legislation passed through the Senate Banking Committee, then chaired by Phil Gramm, who has received $97,350 from Enron employees and its political action committee since 1989. A Gramm spokesman said the senator does not recall talking to his wife, an Enron director, about the energy provision and played "no role" in negotiating it. Wendy Gramm did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Network Enron was a primary player, with Koch Industries Inc., a large, privately held oil and gas company based in Wichita, in pushing for the exemption, a source said. But the company's main effort was focused on the House Agriculture Committee, where the legislation originated. Its chairman and ranking Democrat, Texas Reps. Larry Combest (R) and Charles W. Stenholm (D), respectively, were among the top recipients of Enron campaign donations in the House since 1989.
Digital Cameras The CFTC objected strenuously to the initial draft marked up by the committee, but the Texas congressmen helped work out a compromise between Enron and the agency. The compromise was then offered by Rep. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), the home-state congressman of Koch Industries and a recipient of campaign donations from Enron and Koch in the last election cycle. Moran did not return a phone call seeking a comment.
Desktops Early this year, Lay seemed to be at the height of his political power, getting a private meeting with Vice President Cheney to discuss the administration's energy policy proposals and weighing in on key nominations to FERC.
Cognos Curtis Hebert Jr., FERC's chairman at the time, has reported that Lay called him and implied that Enron would urge the newly installed Bush administration to keep him in the job -- if he changed his views to support Enron's position for faster electricity deregulation. Lay contended that Hebert called him to ask for support.
Hosting Hebert was not reappointed. He was replaced by Texas lawyer Pat Wood III, a strong advocate of deregulation who had the backing of Lay and Enron.
Netfinity Ironically, since Enron's fall, both FERC and Congress seem to be moving in the direction of the deregulated markets Lay and Enron lobbyists had pushed for.
Internet By Dan Morgan and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post - 12/25/2001
Topic: Campaign Finance Reform
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