Word: enronizing
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...Republican White House, which received the vast majority of the Enron money, struck an unbothered pose, relieved that neither Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill nor Commerce Secretary Don Evans had lifted a finger when Enron came calling for help last fall. Still, the Bush team made one tiny bow to the explosive potential of the Enron scandal, hinting for the first time that it might fork over the details of Vice President Cheney's closed-door meetings with energy-industry officials last spring if a congressional committee requested them. Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett predicted that those papers, if released, would...
...anyone was having trouble making Enron go away, it was Harvey Pitt, a lawyer who represented the Big Five accounting firms before Bush named him to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission last year. Until the Enron scandal broke, Pitt had waved away demands for stronger regulation of corporate accounting and auditing. There were calls from lawmakers for Pitt to recuse himself from the SEC probe of Enron, but Pitt refused--after a fashion, anyway--saying that such a step would hurt the agency's standing. He added, however, that director of enforcement Stephen Cutler would run the probe anyway...
These rookies, like Pitt, face a rough season. "There could be other Enron-like situations out there," says Arthur Levitt, the activist former SEC chairman. "Financial legerdemain from seduced audit committees, compromised accountants and inadequate standards could certainly crop up again at other U.S. companies." At the moment, the public's best protection against that sort of surprise is other brave whistle-blowers like Sherron Watkins...
...argument's sake, let's concede the point that everyone in the White House has been at such pains to make: No one in the Bush Administration lifted a finger to save Enron from collapse. But that doesn't mean the $6 million in campaign contributions the company and its executives gave to politicians over the past 12 years should be written off as a bad investment. For most of that time, Enron's Washington friends did pretty much whatever the company wanted...
...What Enron wanted most was to be left alone, free of both regulation and scrutiny as it transformed itself from a dowdy natural-gas-pipeline company into a freewheeling energy-and-communications giant. In the early 1990s Enron became a new kind of business, selling not just energy but exotic financial instruments such as energy futures and options. The company moved the heart of its operations from the oil patch to the trading floor--largely free of regulatory baggage, thanks to allies such as Wendy Gramm. In 1993, as chairwoman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, Gramm helped design rules...