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EDITORIAL • March 3, 2002

Enron and Robert Rubin

Precisely when did Howell Raines — the newly appointed, reputedly hard-charging executive editor of the New York Times — turn the newspaper's front page over to the PR department at Citigroup? Hard to say, but the love affair seems to be real. One recent story in the New York Times began with the observation that Mr. Rubin, a former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, "has not abandoned his role as globe-traveling statesman." Get it? Statesman. Having established the diplomatic bona fides of Mr. Rubin, who now collects $800,000 per week as chairman of Citigroup's executive committee, the Times then ever-so-gingerly broached the understandably touchy subject of the tactics deployed by Mr. Rubin late last year in a telephone call to the highest-ranking Democrat in the Bush administration's Treasury Department.

On Nov. 8, Mr. Rubin called Peter Fisher, undersecretary for domestic finance, on behalf of the collapsing Enron Corp, which just happened to owe Citigroup an estimated $1 billion. According to a Treasury Department statement, which Mr. Rubin has confirmed, he beseeched Mr. Fisher to intercede for Enron's benefit with the credit-rating agencies, which were poised to downgrade Enron's debt to junk status. The debt downgrade would have forced the already-teetering Enron to make an immediate payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, a development that would have then forced Enron to file for bankruptcy. To his everlasting credit, Mr. Fisher rejected Mr. Rubin's strong-arm tactics, and Enron's debt was appropriately downgraded. More...

One by one, Fortune 500 corporate backers saw the DLC as a good investment. By 1990 major firms like AT&T and Philip Morris were important donors. Indeed, according to Reinventing Democrats, Kenneth S. Baer`s history of the DLC, Al From used the organization`s fundraising prowess as blandishment to attract an ambitious young Arkansas governor to replace Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia as DLC chairman. Drawing heavily on internal memos written by From, Bruce Reed, and other DLCers, Baer says that the DLC offered Clinton not only a national platform for his presidential aspirations but "entree into the Washington and New York fundraising communities." Early in the 1992 primaries, writes Baer, "financially, Clinton`s key Wall Street support was almost exclusively DLC-based," especially at firms like New York`sGoldman, Sachs.

The DLC`s investment in Clinton paid off, of course, after the 1992 election. Not only did the DLC bask in its status as idea factory and influence broker for the White House, but it also reaped immediate financial rewards. One month after the election, Clinton headlined a fundraising dinner for the DLC that drew 2,200 to Washington`s Union Station, where tables went for $15,000 apiece. Corporate officials and lobbyists were lined up to meet the new White House occupant, including 139 trade associations, law firms, and companies who kicked in more than $2 million, for a total of $3.3 million raised in a single evening. The DLC-PPI`s revenues climbed steadily upward, reaching $5 million in 1996 and, according to its most recent available tax returns, $6.3 million for 1999. "Our revenues for 2000 will probably end up around $7.2 million," says Chuck Alston, the DLC`s executive director.

While the DLC will not formally disclose its sources of contributions and dues, the full array of its corporate supporters is contained in the program from its annual fall dinner last October, a gala salute to Lieberman that was held at the National Building Museum in Washington. Five tiers of donors are evident: the Board of Advisers, the Policy Roundtable, the Executive Council, the Board of Trustees, and an ad hoc group called the Event Committee--and companies are placed in each tier depending on the size of their check. For $5,000, 180 companies, lobbying firms, and individuals found themselves on the DLC`s board of advisers, including British Petroleum, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Coca-Cola, Dell, Eli Lilly, Federal Express, Glaxo Wellcome, Intel, Motorola, U.S. Tobacco, Union Carbide, and Xerox, along with trade associations ranging from the American Association of Health Plans to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. For $10,000, another 85 corporationssigned on as the DLC`s policy roundtable, including AOL, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Citigroup, Dow, GE, IBM, Oracle, UBS PacifiCare, PaineWebber, Pfizer, Pharmacia and Upjohn, and TRW.

And for $25,000, 28 giant companies found their way onto the DLC`s executive council, including Aetna, AT&T, American Airlines, AIG, BellSouth, Chevron, DuPont,Enron, IBM, Merck and Company, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Texaco, and Verizon Communications. Few, if any, of these corporations would be seen as leaning Democratic, of course, but here and there are some real surprises. One member of the DLC`s executive council is none other than Koch Industries, the privately held, Kansas-based oil company whose namesake family members are avatars of the far right, having helped to found archconservative institutions like the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy. Not only that, but two Koch executives, Richard Fink and Robert P. Hall III, are listed as members of the board of trustees and the event committee, respectively--meaning that they gave significantly more than $25,000.

The DLC board of trustees is an elite body whose membership is reserved for major donors, and many of the trustees are financial wheeler-dealers who run investment companies and capital management firms--thoughsenior executives from a handful of corporations, such as Koch, Aetna, and Coca-Cola,are included. Some donate enormous amounts of money, such as Bernard Schwartz, the chairman and CEO of Loral Space and Communications, who single-handedly finances the entire publication of Blueprint, the DLC`s retooled monthly that replaced The New Democrat.

From: How the DLC does it, The American Prospect, Apr. '01.
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