The real Enron lessons

I’m amazed by the clamor in Washington over the Enron scandal.

Listening to some of the hysterical rhetoric from politicians, you might think it was a big surprise the energy company built a fiscal house of cards. You get the impression from them that, if only they had been able to regulate Enron’s activities more closely, the company might have been saved.

In recent days, Enron has eclipsed even the destruction of the World Trade Center and the international war on terrorism on the political agenda inside the Beltway.

That might be a healthy development if – and that’s a big “if” – the American people and the Congress were addressing the real scandal of Enron, the real causes of its collapse and the real criminality of the way the federal government misused your taxpayer dollars to create and build the monstrosity known as Enron.

Instead, it’s scapegoat time. Instead, government officials are diverting your attention from their crimes. Instead, government officials are preparing a whole new set of restrictive laws that will affect other businesses that have never received the kind of preferential favoritism bestowed on Enron by the federal government.

What do I mean?

With all the noise in Washington, the real story of the rise and fall of Enron has been deliberately obscured.

Let’s revisit some of the key revelations of WorldNetDaily’s Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry:

• Your tax dollars financed or underwrote more than $1.73 billion of overseas Enron projects;

• Long before Enron made headlines for the biggest bankruptcy filing in American history, Chairman Ken Lay got seats on 11 overseas trade trips during the Clinton administration, while diverting company funds to the president’s re-election campaign;

• It was one of the federal government-backed projects – a $3 billion power plant in India – that triggered Enron’s collapse;

• Besides the India project, the federal Export-Import Bank helped finance other deals for Enron in Turkey, China and Venezuela;

• The federal Overseas Private Investment Corp. also sponsored Enron projects in Guatemala, the Philippines, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia;

• A total of 7 percent of all of OPIC’s $16 billion in “investments” of your taxpayer dollars went to Enron;

Now, let me ask you some basic questions:

• Why is the federal government involved in backing risky foreign schemes that private commercial banks wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole?

• Why are the very people responsible for approving such sweetheart deals now moralizing about bad accounting procedures?

• Why do any Americans still trust the federal government to clean up messes it has created?

• Instead of proposing new regulatory squeeze plays on U.S. businesses, why doesn’t the government stop throwing good money after bad on foreign development projects that don’t in any conceivable way benefit Americans?

This is the real scandal – the kind WorldNetDaily has been covering since it began nearly 5 years ago, while the government-media establishment slept. It is apparently still asleep. Go back and do a search in the WorldNetDaily archives on Enron and you will see stories dating back to 1998 describing the company’s participation in former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s infamous trade trips.

The federal government did everything for Enron but hand over blank checks.

In return, Enron paid off officials of both parties with handsome political contributions – but none, mind you, like former President Clinton.

Just four days after Clinton’s cronies greased the skids for Enron’s massive India project in June 1996, the company wrote a $100,000 check to the Democratic National Committee and the president’s re-election effort.

Do you have any faith that Sen. Joe Lieberman, who also took Enron cash, is going to get to the bottom of this scandal? Ha ha! That’s a good one.

The truth is, official Washington’s fingerprints are all over this scam.

No apologies here for President Bush and Vice President Cheney, either. They are further clouding the issue with their declarations of executive privilege regarding meetings with energy executives.

The real lessons of the Enron scandal?

• It’s time to force Washington out of the business of granting political favors to private industry. It’s nothing but corporate welfare.

• It’s time to force Washington to stop illegal spending on foreign development projects. They are unconstitutional.

• It’s time to prosecute the political crimes of the past – or they will be repeated in the future.

In other words, it’s time for the federal government to clean up its own house before even thinking about any more legislation that impacts the way law-abiding U.S. companies do business in America.

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WorldNetDaily’s exclusive Enron coverage:

Huge Enron loans expose taxpayers

Did Enron insiders smell trouble in ’98?

Enron execs regulars on Clinton trade trips

Taxpayer-supported international racketeering

Who’s who in the Commerce scandal

Ron Brown’s Indonesia trip