Indeed, how did Enron fall so quickly? Any corporation is fragile to inside executives like Sherron Watkins or Andrew Fastow selling out on their
bosses. Maybe they did so to obtain personal gains, or because of their loyalty to external third partners (linked to the administration?). Many of
the rumors around Enron's books, this much is clear, were based on nothing more than gossip. Artificially triggered by internal disclosure of the
corporation's financial policies -- causing investors and shareholders to grow increasingly skeptical about the companies' future -- Enron's
bankruptcy was a forced affair, initially causing the Justice Department to have an interest in the Enron rumours only reluctanly. The Enron
executives never got a chance to a fair trial: several legal experts agree on the overcriminalization of the Enron indictment [2], and it indeed
appears that the prosecutors succeeded in nailing the defendants to the wall for a long time, regardless of the legal justification to do so [3].
Ken Lay may have been a Bush financer, but that doesn't mean both families are real friends (is there such a thing as friendship in those circles
anyway?). Another argument is that when Bush declares something to the press, he generally means exactly the opposite. The publicly declared
'friendship' between his father George Herbert Walker Bush and Kenneth Lay, ultimately, could well be a ploy rather than reality.
Indeed, if Lay
really was a Bush crony -- as he is traditionally portrayed to be because of Enron’s donations to the Bush campaign --
there's no chance his supposed friends in the administration would have let this corporation go down. Indeed, if Enron would have been a loyal
partner in the Energy Task Force, especially with such risk of exposure to their own agenda, the trifle problems surrounding Enron would have been
effectively covered up instead of blown wide open.
On the other hand, one could imagine what would happen if Enron failed to agree with the 2001 Energy Group meeting’s proposals, while having first
hand information about their content and their implications for the covert policy the Bush administration is so notorious for. It is to be suspected
that if a highly placed man like Kenneth Lay wasn't loyal enough to Bush’s global agenda, he and his unloyal colleagues would get relentlessly
persecuted, overdramatically punished, and even find themselves in a life-threatening situation. Enron's story of fast judicial destruction, Clifford
Baxter's strange suicide, and Kenneth Lay's sudden massive heart attack bear the hallmarks of what has happened to many other people who failed to
agree with the White House’s policies, or were too well informed about its decisions.
[1]
NRDC's Review of the Bush Administration's Energy Task Force
[2]
Overcriminalization?(PDF)
[3]
Heaviest charges don't involve Enron
[edit on 22-7-2006 by DeltaT]