[nopardons]

Great catch !

Go right ahead, Dems, keep bringing up ENRON, hold Congressional hearings, and get tarred once again with the CLINTON brush of corruption, and quid pro quo !

[TRY ONE]

A lot of discussion about Lay, Klintoon & Bush but no discussion about "The Babe": Rebecca Mark (Enron International President) who "did" the India project and walked away from Enron last year with +$100 million. During the negotiations over the Indian Project, Enron Head Negotiator "Pu$$y Galore" would always show up waring her tight leather mini-skirt to rub salt in the Indian wounds. Her hotel suite in India was called the "Rebecca Palace". And the story goes on and on....

[Nitro]

But by the time Phase 2, twice as big as Phase 1, was nearly completed, the local Indian electricity board reneged on payments, claiming the power bills were too high.

Maybe they were worried about another Bhopal and their own culpability!!

At any rate they didn't trust the USA, why?

[Mo1]

President Clinton lobbied Indian officials on Enron's behalf during his April visit to India.

April?? .. well gee isn't that special .. and all this time I thought he went over there to help raise money for the people of India .. didn't he promise to give them 50 million or something like that??? ...

Maybe we should take a little further look at all his over seas visits???? .. should be interesting

[leadpenny]

Good article. Maybe I missed it but wasn't the final straw before the collapse the pull-out by another company in a proposed buy-out?

[The Raven]

So if India pays the $5 billion to the 401k accounts - would that make everything better?

[mmmmmmmm....... donuts]

That Indian deal didn't go over well for Enron. But let's get a little perspective here: Enron thought it had a money making proposition, and Clinton greased the wheel so a big US company could win the bid. That's what the Commerce Department is SUPPOSED to do. That's hardly scandalous.

To me, there's only Dem that really looks bad, and that's Robert Rubin.

[Maelstrom]

The *REAL* Irony was that I blamed Clinton for Enron's collapse before this article was posted yesterday in a political survey by phone.

How's that for Freeping the World!?

[OldFriend]

What happens to EVERYONE who ever dealt with the clinton administration!!!!!! Does anyone doubt that somewhere along the way clinton enriched himself personally each time he 'helped' someone.

[Brian Allen]

Bump/Ping!

[copycat]

Let's see...California couldn't pay, India Wouldn't pay...and the management was funneling money to offshore shell corps. Is it any wonder Enron crashed?

[syriacus]

Now I know why Imus is still "wondering" (with Jeff Greenfield this morning) if Bush was drinking when he passed out the other day.

To his credit, Greenfield isn't playing along with Imus . Dems were saying that the "pretzel incident" was to distract the media from Bush's involvement with Enron. Well, Imus isn't protecting Bush, for sure, even though he is making a mountain out of a mole hill.

[syriacus]

Pratap Chatterjee should get some credit for reporting this back in 1995. In Political Influence Wins Contracts For Gas Company, he wrote:

Enron, the world's largest natural gas company, uses powerful connections to bid for contracts that observers complain are over-priced...

The 10-year-old company which racked up nine billion dollars in sales last year, shot into the news recently when a state government in India threatened to cancel a 2.8-billion-dollar deal to build a power plant near Bombay....

In Aug. 1993, McLarty arranged an invitation for Lay to play golf with Clinton in Vail, Colorado. This date irritated Oscar White, chief executive of Coastal, another natural gas company that had helped the Clinton election campaign raise funding....

These connections to the Democratic administration have helped Enron considerably, says Ken Silverstein, who publishes Counterpunch, a fortnightly newsletter here.

[Ditter]

I went over to DU last night (yeah I know, its horrible, but someone has to do it) Those guys are still salivating about Bush going down with Enron. They should get out more. There was someone over there named web rattler that they decided was a freeper & he got kicked off last night. He was trying to tell them to pay attention to Lanny Davis. Lanny is saying Enron is going to kick dems in the butt.

[MizSterious]

Good article--see also post #7 in the replies.

[BlueAngel]

Bump!

[concerned about politics]

Clinton wasn't qualified to be a president. He was a young teen-ager in a mans body.

I believe the failure of his presidency will hurt America for years to come.
The man singlehandedly broke our system, allowed us to be attacked , and destroyed the moral fabric keeping America upright in the eyes of the world.

It will take years to correct the damage this boy has done. I hope America has learned a lession from all this.

[Moleman]

Enron's managment was full of crooks, period.
The scandle here is a business corruption issue, not political in nature.
Neither the former, and certainly not the current, Government administrations are responsible for what happened.
Get over it Freepers, Klinton is not the cause of EVERYTHING that is wrong in the world.

[Tinman]

Bump

[r9etb]

The World Bank, for example, concluded such a project was "not economically viable," warning that the plants would produce power too costly for the state.

Yet they did it anyway. Something besides good business sense was obviously at work here.

It reminds me of several costly failed satellite ventures (Iridium, Globalstar, Teledesic, to name three). The reasoning is always along these lines:

Because there are lots of people in the area, and no services (electrical or communication), there's this huge market just waiting to be tapped. If "it" gets built, huge profits will come flowing in! Besides which, it's so cool that people will just have to have one!

Of course, if the supposed market really existed, it would already have been tapped -- but that never seems to occur to these folks. So they die in a bankrupt heap.

In my experience (on the satellite side), the powers that be are blind to this logic -- they actively avoid considering it. Quite often the discussion of profit leaps directly into a utopian vision of helping the underprivileged, regardless of profit. The real motivation is a combination of engineering gadget-love, rationalized by a muzzy, ill-considered desire to lift poor people out of their holes. Neither of these will float a business, though it often helps snare utopian investors.

This brings us to the Enron situation: Clinton and toadies were undoubtedly caught up in the utopian vision. Enron may or may not have been affected by utopian thoughts. But their primary motivation was undoubtedly more cynical: they probably figured that if India didn't pay up, the U.S. would -- a no-lose situation that was in perfect concord with their political approach to business.

A President Gore probably would have bailed them out, for largely utopian reasons.

George W. Bush did not -- which suggests that he's not generally swayed by utopian visions.